|   | 
Details
   web
Records
Author Goto, K.; Lea, S.E.G.; Dittrich, W.H.
Title Discrimination of intentional and random motion paths by pigeons Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 3 Pages 119-127
Keywords (down) Animals; *Columbidae; *Discrimination Learning; *Motion Perception; Recognition (Psychology)
Abstract Twelve pigeons ( Columba livia) were trained on a go/no-go schedule to discriminate between two kinds of movement patterns of dots, which to human observers appear to be “intentional” and “non-intentional” movements. In experiment 1, the intentional motion stimulus contained one dot (a “wolf”) that moved systematically towards another dot as though stalking it, and three distractors (“sheep”). The non-intentional motion stimulus consisted of four distractors but no stalker. Birds showed some improvement of discrimination as the sessions progressed, but high levels of discrimination were not reached. In experiment 2, the same birds were tested with different stimuli. The same parameters were used but the number of intentionally moving dots in the intentional motion stimulus was altered, so that three wolves stalked one sheep. Despite the enhanced difference of movement patterns, the birds did not show any further improvement in discrimination. However, birds for which the non-intentional stimulus was associated with reward showed a decline in discrimination. These results indicated that pigeons can discriminate between stimuli that do and do not contain an element that human observer see as moving intentionally. However, as no feature-positive effect was found in experiment 1, it is assumed that pigeons did not perceive or discriminate these stimuli on the basis that the intentional stimuli contained a feature that the non-intentional stimuli lacked, though the convergence seen in experiment 2 may have been an effective feature for the pigeons. Pigeons seem to be able to recognise some form of multiple simultaneously goal-directed motions, compared to random motions, as a distinctive feature, but do not seem to use simple “intentional” motion paths of two geometrical figures, embedded in random motions, as a feature whose presence or absence differentiates motion displays.
Address School of Psychology, University of Exeter, Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK. K.Goto@exeter.ac.uk
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12357284 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2601
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jackson, R.R.; Pollard, S.D.; Cerveira, A.M.
Title Opportunistic use of cognitive smokescreens by araneophagic jumping spiders Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 3 Pages 147-157
Keywords (down) Animals; *Cognition; Movement; Optics; *Predatory Behavior; *Spiders; Touch; Visual Perception
Abstract Little is known about how a prey species' cognitive limitations might shape a predator's prey-capture strategy. A specific hypothesis is investigated: predators take advantage of times when the prey's attention is focussed on its own prey. Portia fimbriata, an araneophagic jumping spider (Salticidae) from Queensland, is shown in a series of 11 experiments to exploit opportunistically a situation in which a web-building spider on which it preys, Zosis genicularis (Uloboridae), is preoccupied with wrapping up its own prey. Experimental evidence supports three conclusions: (1). while relying on optical cues alone, P. fimbriata perceives when Z. genicularis is wrapping up prey; (2). when busy wrapping up prey, the responsiveness of Z. genicularis to cues from potential predators is diminished; and (3). P. fimbriata moves primarily during intervals when Z. genicularis is busy wrapping up prey. P. fimbriata's strategy is effective partly because the wrapping behaviour of Z. genicularis masks the web signals generated by the advancing P. fimbriata's footsteps and also because, while wrapping, Z. genicularis' attention is diverted away from predator-revealing cues.
Address Department of Zoology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12357287 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2598
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Dudchenko, P.A.; Davidson, M.
Title Rats use a sense of direction to alternate on T-mazes located in adjacent rooms Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 2 Pages 115-118
Keywords (down) Animals; *Cognition; Male; *Maze Learning; Rats; Rats, Inbred Strains; Space Perception
Abstract Lister hooded rats were trained on a forced-sample T-maze alternation task in an environment lacking spatial landmarks. An early study of spontaneous alternation on the T-maze had shown that rats use a “spatial sense” to select alternate maze arms across mazes. As this phenomenon may provide a useful tool for studying the neural substrates of a directional sense, we wished to confirm this finding on a different version of the T-maze task, with well-trained animals. We found that rats successfully selected the appropriate maze arm when the choice phase of the task was presented on a second maze, oriented in the same direction, and located in an adjacent room. However, choice performance fell to chance level when the second maze was oriented 90 degrees relative to the first. This result suggests that the rats do not simply alternate turns across the two environments, but rather that they rely on a sense of direction that is carried across environments.
Address Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK. p.a.dudchenko@stir.ac.uk
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12150036 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2608
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Funk, M.S.
Title Problem solving skills in young yellow-crowned parakeets (Cyanoramphus auriceps) Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 3 Pages 167-176
Keywords (down) Animals; *Cognition; *Discrimination Learning; Female; Motor Skills; *Parakeets; Play and Playthings; *Problem Solving; Social Behavior
Abstract Despite the long divergent evolutionary history of birds and mammals, early avian and primate cognitive development have many convergent features. Some of these features were investigated with a series of tasks designed to assess human infant development. The tasks were presented to young parakeets to assess their means-end problem solving abilities. Examples of these early skills are: attaining and playing with objects, retrieving rewards through use of a stick or rake, or by pulling in rewards on supports or on the ends of strings. Twelve such tasks were presented to 11 young yellow-crowned parakeets ( Cyanoramphus auriceps) to investigate their natural abilities; there was no attempt to train them to do those tasks that they did not spontaneously perform. Six of the birds were parent-raised and five were hand-raised. The birds completed 9 of the 12 tasks, demonstrating all the Piagetian sensorimotor circular reactions, but they failed to hand-watch (“claw-watch”), to stack objects, or to fill a container. Their ordinality on the tasks differed from that of human infants in that locomotion to obtain objects occurred earlier in the avian sequence of development and the mid-level tasks were performed by the two groups of avian subjects in a mixed order perhaps indicating that these abilities may not emerge in any particular order for these birds as they supposedly do for human infants. The hand-raised group needed fewer sessions to complete these means-end tasks.
Address Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. mdfunk@northwestern.edu
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12357289 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2596
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Chase, I.D.; Tovey, C.; Spangler-Martin, D.; Manfredonia, M.
Title Individual differences versus social dynamics in the formation of animal dominance hierarchies Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Abbreviated Journal Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
Volume 99 Issue 8 Pages 5744-5749
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; Fishes; Humans; *Social Behavior; *Social Dominance
Abstract Linear hierarchies, the classical pecking-order structures, are formed readily in both nature and the laboratory in a great range of species including humans. However, the probability of getting linear structures by chance alone is quite low. In this paper we investigate the two hypotheses that are proposed most often to explain linear hierarchies: they are predetermined by differences in the attributes of animals, or they are produced by the dynamics of social interaction, i.e., they are self-organizing. We evaluate these hypotheses using cichlid fish as model animals, and although differences in attributes play a significant part, we find that social interaction is necessary for high proportions of groups with linear hierarchies. Our results suggest that dominance hierarchy formation is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than previously thought, and we explore the implications of these results for evolutionary biology, the social sciences, and the use of animal models in understanding human social organization.
Address Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4356, USA. Ichase@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0027-8424 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:11960030 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 442
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Broom, M.
Title A unified model of dominance hierarchy formation and maintenance Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Journal of theoretical biology Abbreviated Journal J. Theor. Biol.
Volume 219 Issue 1 Pages 63-72
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; Feeding Behavior; *Models, Psychological; *Social Dominance; Social Environment
Abstract In many different species it is common for animals to spend large portions of their lives in groups. Such groups need to divide available resources amongst the individuals they contain and this is often achieved by means of a dominance hierarchy. Sometimes hierarchies are stable over a long period of time and new individuals slot into pre-determined positions, but there are many situations where this is not so and a hierarchy is formed out of a group of individuals meeting for the first time. There are several different models both of the formation of such dominance hierarchies and of already existing hierarchies. These models often treat the two phases as entirely separate, whereas in reality, if there is a genuine formation phase to the hierarchy, behaviour in this phase will be governed by the rewards available, which in turn depends upon how the hierarchy operates once it has been formed. This paper describes a method of unifying models of these two distinct phases, assuming that the hierarchy formed is stable. In particular a framework is introduced which allows a variety of different models of each of the two parts to be used in conjunction with each other, thus enabling a wide range of situations to be modelled. Some examples are given to show how this works in practice.
Address Centre for Statistics and Stochastic Modelling, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QH, U.K. m.broom@sussex.ac.uk
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0022-5193 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12392975 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 439
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Caldwell, C.A.; Whiten, A.
Title Evolutionary perspectives on imitation: is a comparative psychology of social learning possible? Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 4 Pages 193-208
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; Evolution; Humans; *Imitative Behavior; Learning; Models, Animal
Abstract Studies of imitation in animals have become numerous in recent times, but do they contribute to a comparative psychology of social learning? We review this burgeoning field to identify the problems and prospects for such a goal. Difficulties of two main kinds are identified. First, researchers have tackled questions about social learning from at least three very different theoretical perspectives, the “phylogenetic”, “animal model”, and “adaptational”. We examine the conflicts between them and consider the scope for integration. A second difficulty arises in the methodological approaches used in the discipline. In relation to one of these – survey reviews of published studies – we tabulate and compare the contrasting conclusions of nine articles that together review 36 studies. The basis for authors' disagreements, including the matters of perceptual opacity, novelty, sequential structure, and goal representation, are examined. In relation to the other key method, comparative experimentation, we identify 12 studies that have explicitly compared species' imitative ability on similar tasks. We examine the principal problems of comparing like with like in these studies and consider solutions, the most powerful of which we propose to be the use of a systematic range of task designs, rather than any single “gold standard” task.
Address School of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK. C.A.Caldwell@exeter.ac.uk
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12461597 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2593
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Viscido, S.V.; Miller, M.; Wethey, D.S.
Title The dilemma of the selfish herd: the search for a realistic movement rule Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Journal of theoretical biology Abbreviated Journal J. Theor. Biol.
Volume 217 Issue 2 Pages 183-194
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; *Mass Behavior; Models, Biological; *Motor Activity; Predatory Behavior
Abstract The selfish herd hypothesis predicts that aggregations form because individuals move toward one another to minimize their own predation risk. The “dilemma of the selfish herd” is that movement rules that are easy for individuals to follow, fail to produce true aggregations, while rules that produce aggregations require individual behavior so complex that one may doubt most animals can follow them. If natural selection at the individual level is responsible for herding behavior, a solution to the dilemma must exist. Using computer simulations, we examined four different movement rules. Relative predation risk was different for all four movement rules (p<0.05). We defined three criteria for measuring the quality of a movement rule. A good movement rule should (a) be statistically likely to benefit an individual that follows it, (b) be something we can imagine most animals are capable of following, and (c) result in a centrally compact flock. The local crowded horizon rule, which allowed individuals to take the positions of many flock-mates into account, but decreased the influence of flock-mates with distance, best satisfied these criteria. The local crowded horizon rule was very sensitive to the animal's perceptive ability. Therefore, the animal's ability to detect its neighbors is an important factor in the dynamics of group formation.
Address Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA. viscido@u.washington.edu
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0022-5193 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12202112 Approved no
Call Number refbase @ user @ Serial 554
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ray, E.D.; Heyes, C.M.
Title Do rats in a two-action test encode movement egocentrically or allocentrically? Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.
Volume 5 Issue 4 Pages 245-252
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; *Discrimination Learning; *Imitative Behavior; Male; Random Allocation; Rats/physiology/*psychology; Smell
Abstract Two-action tests of imitation compare groups that observe topographically different responses to a common manipulandum. The general aim of the two experiments reported here was to find a demonstrator-consistent responding effect in a procedure that could be elaborated to investigate aspects of what was learned about the demonstrated lever response. Experiment 1 was a pilot study with rats of a variant of the two-action method of investigating social learning about observed responses. Groups of observer rats ( Rattus norvegicus) saw a demonstrator push a lever up or down for a food reward. When these observers were subsequently given access to the lever and rewarded for responses in both directions, their directional preferences were compared with two 'screen control' groups that were unable to see their demonstrators' behaviour. Demonstrator-consistent responding was found to be restricted to observers that were able to see demonstrator performance, suggesting that scent cues alone were insufficient to cue a preference for the demonstrators' response direction and thereby that the rats learned by observation about body movements (imitation) or lever movement (emulation). Experiment 2 assessed responding on two levers, one that had been manipulated by the demonstrator, and a second, transposed lever positioned some distance away. Demonstrator-consistent responding was abolished when actions were observed and performed in different parts of the apparatus, suggesting that observed movement was encoded allocentrically with respect to the apparatus rather than egocentrically with respect to the actor's body. With particular reference to the influence of scent cues, the results are discussed in relation to the strengths and weaknesses of this and other varieties of the two-action procedure as tests of imitation in animals and human infants.
Address Department of Psychology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK. e.ray@ucl.ac.uk
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1435-9448 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12461602 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2588
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Weir, A.A.S.; Chappell, J.; Kacelnik, A.
Title Shaping of hooks in New Caledonian crows Type Journal Article
Year 2002 Publication Science (New York, N.Y.) Abbreviated Journal Science
Volume 297 Issue 5583 Pages 981
Keywords (down) Animals; *Behavior, Animal; *Cognition; Female; Male; Songbirds/*physiology
Abstract
Address Department of Zoology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1095-9203 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes PMID:12169726 Approved no
Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2842
Permanent link to this record