Abstract: Studies on leadership during group movements in several lemur species showed that females were responsible for the travelling choices concerning time and direction. Interestingly, in these species females are dominant over males. We investigated the influence of social organisation upon leadership processes by studying a lemur species in which social organisation is characterized by the absence of female dominance: the brown lemur (Eulemur fulvus fulvus). The study was conducted on a semi-free ranging group of 11 individuals and the analysis performed on 69 group movements showed that all the individuals could initiate a group movement. In 34 cases, the whole group moved. There was no significant difference in the number of start attempts or in the number of group members involved from one initiator to another. Moreover, there was no effect of sex or age of the initiator on the number of individuals following it or on the speed of the joining process. Therefore, the leadership observed is widely distributed to all group members. These results support the hypothesis of an influence of social organisation upon the decision-making processes but still remain to be studied in a more relevant ecological context.

Abstract: Behavioural innovations have become central to our thinking about how animals adjust to changing environments. It is now well established that animals vary in their ability to innovate, but understanding why remains a challenge. This is because innovations are rare, so studying innovation requires alternative experimental assays that create opportunities for animals to express their ability to invent new behaviours, or use pre-existing ones in new contexts. Problem solving of extractive foraging tasks has been put forward as a suitable experimental assay. We review the rapidly expanding literature on problem solving of extractive foraging tasks in order to better understand to what extent the processes underpinning problem solving, and the factors influencing problem solving, are in line with those predicted, and found, to underpin and influence innovation in the wild. Our aim is to determine whether problem solving can be used as an experimental proxy of innovation. We find that in most respects, problem solving is determined by the same underpinning mechanisms, and is influenced by the same factors, as those predicted to underpin, and to influence, innovation. We conclude that problem solving is a valid experimental assay for studying innovation, propose a conceptual model of problem solving in which motor diversity plays a more central role than has been considered to date, and provide recommendations for future research using problem solving to investigate innovation. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Cognition in the wild.

Abstract: There is much interest in studying animal personalities but considerable debate as to how to define and evaluate them. We assessed the utility of one proposed framework while studying personality in terrestrial hermit crabs (Coenobita clypeatus). We recorded the latency of individuals to emerge from their shells over multiple trials in four unique manipulations. We used the specific testing situations within these manipulations to define two temperament categories (shyness-boldness and exploration-avoidance). Our results identified individual behavioral consistency (i.e., personality) across repeated trials of the same situations, within both categories. Additionally, we found correlations between behaviors across contexts (traits) that suggested that the crabs had behavioral syndromes. While we found some correlations between behaviors that are supposed to measure the same temperament trait, these correlations were not inevitable. Furthermore, a principal component analysis (PCA) of our data revealed new relationships between behaviors and provided the foundation for an alternate interpretation: measured behaviors may be situation-specific, and may not reflect general personality traits at all. These results suggest that more attention must be placed on how we infer personalities from standardized methods, and that we must be careful to not force our data to fit our frameworks.

Abstract: Examples of how animals learn when multiple, sometimes redundant, cues are present provide further examples not considered by Hutchinson and Gigerenzer that seem to fit the principle of taking the best. “The best” may the most valid cue in the present circumstances; evolution may also produce species-specific biases to use the most functionally relevant cues.

Abstract: Dogs' ability to recognise cues of human visual attention was studied in different experiments. Study 1 was designed to test the dogs' responsiveness to their owner's tape-recorded verbal commands (Down!) while the Instructor (who was the owner of the dog) was facing either the dog or a human partner or none of them, or was visually separated from the dog. Results show that dogs were more ready to follow the command if the Instructor attended them during instruction compared to situations when the Instructor faced the human partner or was out of sight of the dog. Importantly, however, dogs showed intermediate performance when the Instructor was orienting into 'empty space' during the re-played verbal commands. This suggests that dogs are able to differentiate the focus of human attention. In Study 2 the same dogs were offered the possibility to beg for food from two unfamiliar humans whose visual attention (i.e. facing the dog or turning away) was systematically varied. The dogs' preference for choosing the attentive person shows that dogs are capable of using visual cues of attention to evaluate the human actors' responsiveness to solicit food-sharing. The dogs' ability to understand the communicatory nature of the situations is discussed in terms of their social cognitive skills and unique evolutionary history.