Abstract: Primate sociality has received much attention and its complexity has been viewed as a driving force for the evolution of cognitive abilities. Improved analytic techniques have allowed primate researchers to reveal intricate social networks based on the exchange of cooperative acts and services. Although nonprimates are known to show similar behavior (e.g., cooperative hunting, food sharing, coalitions) there seems a consensus that social life is less complex than in primates. Here the authors present the first group-level analysis of reciprocity of social interactions in a social carnivore, the ring-tailed coati (<xh:i xmlns:search=“http://marklogic.com/appservices/search” xmlns=“http://apa.org/pimain” xmlns:xsi=“http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns:xh=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>Nasua nasua</xh:i>). The authors found that support in aggressive conflicts is a common feature in coatis and that this behavior is reciprocally exchanged in a manner seemingly as complex as in primates. Given that reciprocity correlations persisted after controlling for the effect of spatial association and subunit membership, some level of scorekeeping may be involved. Further studies will be needed to confirm our findings and understand the mechanisms underlying such reciprocity, but our results contribute to the body of work that has begun to challenge primate supremacy in social complexity and cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Abstract: Domesticated animals are characterized by variability of breeds. There is a great diversity in body size and/or coat color between different breeds. However, there are few scientific researches about difference in cognition and behavior between breeds. Comparison of behavior between breeds may be useful for the study of genetics behind the diversity of cognition and behavior. In the present study, we investigated behavioral differences between horse breeds. We tested two different breeds which have different histories, thoroughbreds and creoles. Thoroughbreds are racing horses which have been exposed to strict selection toward racing performance for about 300 years. Creoles are descendents of horses which were brought to South America by Spanish people in 15th century and used by native cowboys for riding. We compared the behavior in a difficult situation by using an “unsolvable task”. The experimenter put a food reward into a transparent box and closed it firmly so that horses could not take the reward. We compared the referential behavior (gazing behavior toward the experimenter) between thoroughbreds and creoles. We analyzed referential behavior by using generalized linear models (GLM) and model selection by Akaike’s information criterion (AIC). There were no effect of breed in the frequency and the duration of the referential behavior. But the latency before looking at the experimenter tended to be shorter in thoroughbreds than in creoles. This result suggests that there may be breed differences in horses’ social cognition and behavior. However, the effect of sex was also seen. Furthermore, we could not exclude the environmental effect (e. g. feeding environments, trainings) in this study. So we cannot explain the variation in referential behavior by breed effect only. We need to replicate the result by controlling environmental effects.