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Cheney, D. L., Seyfarth, R. M., & Silk, J. B. (1995). The responses of female baboons (Papio cynocephalus ursinus) to anomalous social interactions: evidence for causal reasoning? J Comp Psychol, 109(2), 134–141.
Abstract: Baboons' (Papio cynocephalus ursinus) understanding of cause-effect relations in the context of social interactions was examined through use of a playback experiment. Under natural conditions, dominant female baboons often grunt to more subordinate mothers when interacting with their infants. Mothers occasionally respond to these grunts by uttering submissive fear barks. Subjects were played causally inconsistent call sequences in which a lower ranking female apparently grunted to a higher ranking female, and the higher ranking female apparently responded with fear barks. As a control, subjects heard a sequence made causally consistent by the inclusion of grunts from a 3rd female that was dominant to both of the others. Subjects responded significantly more strongly to the causally inconsistent sequences, suggesting that they recognized the factors that cause 1 individual to give submissive vocalizations to another.
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Call, J., Brauer, J., Kaminski, J., & Tomasello, M. (2003). Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans. J Comp Psychol, 117(3), 257–263.
Abstract: Twelve domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were given a series of trials in which they were forbidden to take a piece of visible food. In some trials, the human continued to look at the dog throughout the trial (control condition), whereas in others, the human (a) left the room, (b) turned her back, (c) engaged in a distracting activity, or (d) closed her eyes. Dogs behaved in clearly different ways in most of the conditions in which the human did not watch them compared with the control condition, in which she did. In particular, when the human looked at them, dogs retrieved less food, approached it in a more indirect way, and sat (as opposed to laid down) more often than in the other conditions. Results are discussed in terms of domestic dogs' social-cognitive skills and their unique evolutionary and ontogenetic histories.
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Schwab, C., & Huber, L. (2006). Obey or not obey? Dogs (Canis familiaris) behave differently in response to attentional states of their owners. J Comp Psychol, 120(3), 169–175.
Abstract: Sixteen domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were tested in a familiar context in a series of 1-min trials on how well they obeyed after being told by their owner to lie down. Food was used in 1/3 of all trials, and during the trial the owner engaged in 1 of 5 activities. The dogs behaved differently depending on the owner's attention to them. When being watched by the owner, the dogs stayed lying down most often and/or for the longest time compared with when the owner read a book, watched TV, turned his or her back on them, or left the room. These results indicate that the dogs sensed the attentional state of their owners by judging observable behavioral cues such as eye contact and eye, head, and body orientation.
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Horowitz, A. C. (2003). Do humans ape? Or do apes human? Imitation and intention in humans (Homo sapiens) and other animals. J Comp Psychol, 117(3), 325–336.
Abstract: A. Whiten, D. M. Custance, J.-C. Gomez, P. Teixidor, and K. A. Bard (1996) tested chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) and human children's (Homo sapiens) skills at imitation with a 2-action test on an “artificial fruit.” Chimpanzees imitated to a restricted degree; children were more thoroughly imitative. Such results prompted some to assert that the difference in imitation indicates a difference in the subjects' understanding of the intentions of the demonstrator (M. Tomasello, 1996). In this experiment, 37 adult human subjects were tested with the artificial fruit. Far from being perfect imitators, the adults were less imitative than the children. These results cast doubt on the inference from imitative performance to an ability to understand others' intentions. The results also demonstrate how any test of imitation requires a control group and attention to the level of behavioral analysis.
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Hostetter, A. B., Cantero, M., & Hopkins, W. D. (2001). Differential use of vocal and gestural communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in response to the attentional status of a human (Homo sapiens). J. Comp. Psychol., 115(4), 337–343.
Abstract: This study examined the communicative behavior of 49 captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), particularly their use of vocalizations, manual gestures, and other auditory- or tactile-based behaviors as a means of gaining an inattentive audience's attention. A human (Homo sapiens) experimenter held a banana while oriented either toward or away from the chimpanzee. The chimpanzees' behavior was recorded for 60 s. Chimpanzees emitted vocalizations faster and were more likely to produce vocalizations as their 1st communicative behavior when a human was oriented away from them. Chimpanzees used manual gestures more frequently and faster when the human was oriented toward them. These results replicate the findings of earlier studies on chimpanzee gestural communication and provide new information about the intentional and functional use of their vocalizations.
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Itakura, S. (2004). Gaze Following and Joint Visual Attention in Nonhuman Animals. Jpn. Psychol. Res., 3. Retrieved June 20, 2024, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5584.2004.00253.x
Abstract: n this paper, studies of gaze-following and joint visual attention in nonhuman animals are reviewed from the theoretical perspective of Emery (2000). There are many studies of gaze-following and joint visual attention in nonhuman primates. The reports concern not only adult individuals but also the development of these abilities. Studies to date suggest that monkeys and apes are able to follow the gaze of others, but only apes can understand the seeing-knowing relationship with regards to conspecifics in competitive situations. Also, there have recently been some reports of ability to follow the gaze of humans in domestic animals, such as dogs or horses, interacting with humans. These domestic animals are considered to have acquired this ability during their long history of selective breeding by humans. However, we need to clarify social gaze parameters in various species to improve our knowledge of the evolution of how we process others gazing, attention, and mental states.
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Proops, L., McComb, K., & Reby, D. (2008). Cross-modal individual vocal recognition in the domestic horse. In IESM 2008.
Abstract: Horses fulfill many of the criteria for a species in which it would be adaptive to be capable of individual recognition: they are highly social, form strong and long lasting bonds, their affiliations are rarely kin based, they have a fission-fusion social structure and they possess inter and intra-group dominance hierarchies.
We used a novel cross-modal, expectancy violation paradigm to provide the first systematic evidence that a non-human animal – the domestic horse- is capable of cross modal recognition. We believe this paradigm could provide an ideal way to study individual recognition across a wide range of species.
For full published details see: Proops L, McComb K, Reby D (2009) Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses (Equus caballus). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106: 947-951.
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Takimoto, A., & Fujita, K. (2008). Are horses (Equus caballus) sensitive to human attentional states? In IESM 2008.
Abstract: The ability to reliably detect what others are attending to seems important for social species to interact with their partners. Domestic horses (Equus caballus) have lived with humans for over five thousand years, hence they might have developed sensitivity to human attention. In the present study, we investigated whether horses would discriminate the situation in which a human experimenter could see them from the situation in which she could not. Specifically, we tested whether horses understand the role of eyes in human attentional states, produce more visual gestures when the experimenter can see their begging behaviors and produce more auditory or tactile gestures when she can not. We used with a slight modification the paradigm that previously yielded support for chimpanzee understanding of human attention (Hostetter et al. 2007). Twelve horses were offered food by the experimenter who showed various attentional states in front of them. We scored frequency of begging behaviors by the horses. In experiment 1, we set three kinds of condition: hand over the eyes, hand over the mouth and away. In the last condition there was only a food in front of horses, which was a control condition. The results showed that horses produced more auditory or tactile begging behaviors when the experimenter“s eyes were not visible than when her eyes were visible, but there was no difference in visual begging behaviors. In experiment 2, we set two kinds of condition: eyes closed and eyes open. The horses also produced more auditory or tactile begging behaviors when the experimenter”s eyes were closed than when they were open. However, there was no difference in visual begging behaviors. These results show that horses discriminate the situation in which humans can see from that in which humans can not. Of special interest, horses increased only auditory or tactile behaviors, not all types of communicative behaviors, when the experimenter could not see their begging behaviors. This result suggests that horses are sensitive to human attentional states. Moreover, horses may do recognize the eyes as an important indicator of whether or not humans will respond to their behavior and they may be able to behave flexibly depending upon human attentional states
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Proops, L., McComb, K., & Reby, D. (2008). Horse-human interactions: Attention attribution and the use of human cues by domestic horses (Equus caballus). In IESM 2008.
Abstract: Recent research has shown that domestic dogs are particularly good at reading human attentional cues, often outperforming chimpanzees and hand reared wolves [1, 2]. It has been suggested that the close evolutionary relationship between humans and dogs has led to the development of this ability, however very few other species have been studied [3]. We tested the ability of 24 domestic horses to discriminate between an attentive and inattentive person when choosing whom to approach for food. While the attentive person faced forwards, the inattentive person either stood with their body turned 180° away from the subject (body orientation condition), stood with their body facing forwards but their head facing away (head orientation condition) or stood facing forwards but with their eyes closed (eyes closed condition). A fourth, mixed condition was included where the attentive person stood with their body facing away from the subjects but their head turned towards the subject while the inattentive person stood with their body facing the subject but their head turned away. Horses chose the attentive person significantly more often using the body cue (n = 24, k = 19, p = 0.003), the head cue (n = 24, k = 18, p = 0.011), and the eye cue (n = 24, k = 19, p = 0.003) but not the mixed cue (n = 24, k = 13, p = 0.42). In an additional pilot study, horses were tested in an object choice task. A human experimenter cued one of two buckets by either tapping the bucket (tap condition), orienting their body towards the bucket and pointing (body and point condition), pointing while facing forwards (point condition) or orienting their body towards the bucket (body condition). If the subjects chose the correct bucket they were rewarded. Subjects were able to use the tap cue (n = 31, k = 21, p = 0.035), body + point cue (n= 31, k = 21, p = 0.035) and the point cue (n = 30, k = 21, p = 0.021) but not the body cue (n = 31, k = 11, p = 0.076). These results taken together suggest that domestic horses are also very sensitive to human attentional cues, including gaze.
Keywords:
social cognition, animal-human interaction, horses, attention attribution, domestication
1. Hare, B., Brown, M., Williamson, C., and Tomasello, M. (2002). The domestication of social cognition in dogs. Science 298, 1634-1636.
2. Gacsi, M., Miklosi, A., Varga, O., Topal, J., and Csanyi, V. (2004). Are readers of our face readers of our minds` Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human’s attention. Animal Cognition 7, 144-153.
3. Hare, B., and Tomasello, M. (2005). Human-like social skills in dogs? Trends Cogn. Sci. 9, 439-444.
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Acuna, B. D., Sanes, J. N., & Donoghue, J. P. (2002). Cognitive mechanisms of transitive inference. Exp Brain Res, 146(1), 1–10.
Abstract: We examined how the brain organizes interrelated facts during learning and how the facts are subsequently manipulated in a transitive inference (TI) paradigm (e.g., if A<B and B<C, then A<C). This task determined features such as learned facts and behavioral goals, but the learned facts could be organized in any of several ways. For example, if one learns a list by operating on paired items, the pairs may be stored individually as separate facts and reaction time (RT) should decrease with learning. Alternatively, the pairs may be stored as a single, unified list, which may yield a different RT pattern. We characterized RT patterns that occurred as participants learned, by trial and error, the predetermined order of 11 shapes. The task goal was to choose the shape occurring closer to the end of the list, and feedback about correctness was provided during this phase. RT increased even as its variance decreased during learning, suggesting that the learnt knowledge became progressively unified into a single representation, requiring more time to manipulate as participants acquired relational knowledge. After learning, non-adjacent (NA) list items were presented to examine how participants reasoned in a TI task. The task goal also required choosing from each presented pair the item occurring closer to the list end, but without feedback. Participants could solve the TI problems by applying formal logic to the previously learnt pairs of adjacent items; alternatively, they could manipulate a single, unified representation of the list. Shorter RT occurred for NA pairs having more intervening items, supporting the hypothesis that humans employ unified mental representations during TI. The response pattern does not support mental logic solutions of applying inference rules sequentially, which would predict longer RT with more intervening items. We conclude that the brain organizes information in such a way that reflects the relations among the items, even if the facts were learned in an arbitrary order, and that this representation is subsequently used to make inferences.
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