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McComb, K.; Shannon, G.; Durant, S.M.; Sayialel, K.; Slotow, R.; Poole, J.; Moss, C. |
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Title |
Leadership in elephants: the adaptive value of age |
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2011 |
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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
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Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. |
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278 |
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1722 |
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3270-3276 |
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The value of age is well recognized in human societies, where older individuals often emerge as leaders in tasks requiring specialized knowledge, but what part do such individuals play in other social species? Despite growing interest in how effective leadership might be achieved in animal social systems, the specific role that older leaders may play in decision-making has rarely been experimentally investigated. Here, we use a novel playback paradigm to demonstrate that in African elephants (Loxodonta africana), age affects the ability of matriarchs to make ecologically relevant decisions in a domain critical to survival—the assessment of predatory threat. While groups consistently adjust their defensive behaviour to the greater threat of three roaring lions versus one, families with younger matriarchs typically under-react to roars from male lions despite the severe danger they represent. Sensitivity to this key threat increases with matriarch age and is greatest for the oldest matriarchs, who are likely to have accumulated the most experience. Our study provides the first empirical evidence that individuals within a social group may derive significant benefits from the influence of an older leader because of their enhanced ability to make crucial decisions about predatory threat, generating important insights into selection for longevity in cognitively advanced social mammals. |
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Equine Behaviour @ team @ |
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5652 |
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Proops, L.; Rayner, J.; Taylor, A.M.; McComb, K. |
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Title |
The Responses of Young Domestic Horses to Human-Given Cues |
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2013 |
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PLoS ONE |
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PLoS ONE |
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8 |
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6 |
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e67000 EP - |
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<p>It has been suggested that the process of domestication, at least in some species, has led to an innate predisposition to be skilled at reading human communicative and attentional cues. Adult domestic horses (<italic>Equus caballus</italic>) are highly sensitive to subtle bodily cues when determining if a person is attending to them but they are less adept at using human communicative cues in object choice tasks. Here we provide the first study into the ontogeny of such skills in order to gain insights into the mechanisms underlying these abilities. Compared with adult horses, youngsters under the age of three could use body orientation but not more subtle cues such as head movement and open/closed eyes to correctly choose an attentive person to approach for food. Across two object choice experiments, the performance of young horses was comparable to that of adult horses – subjects were able to correctly choose a rewarded bucket using marker placement, pointing and touching cues but could not use body orientation, gaze, elbow pointing or tapping cues. Taken together these results do not support the theory that horses possess an innate predisposition to be particularly skilled at using human cues. Horses' ability to determine whether humans are attending to them using subtle body cues appears to require significant experience to fully develop and their perhaps less remarkable use of limited cues in object choice tasks, although present at a much earlier age, is likely to reflect a more general learning ability related to stimulus enhancement rather than a specific ‘human-reading’ skill.</p> |
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Public Library of Science |
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Equine Behaviour @ team @ |
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5676 |
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Smith, A.V.; Proops, L.; Grounds, K.; Wathan, J.; McComb, K. |
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Functionally relevant responses to human facial expressions of emotion in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) |
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2016 |
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Biology Letters |
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Biol. Lett. |
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12 |
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2 |
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Whether non-human animals can recognize human signals, including emotions, has both scientific and applied importance, and is particularly relevant for domesticated species. This study presents the first evidence of horses' abilities to spontaneously discriminate between positive (happy) and negative (angry) human facial expressions in photographs. Our results showed that the angry faces induced responses indicative of a functional understanding of the stimuli: horses displayed a left-gaze bias (a lateralization generally associated with stimuli perceived as negative) and a quicker increase in heart rate (HR) towards these photographs. Such lateralized responses towards human emotion have previously only been documented in dogs, and effects of facial expressions on HR have not been shown in any heterospecific studies. Alongside the insights that these findings provide into interspecific communication, they raise interesting questions about the generality and adaptiveness of emotional expression and perception across species. |
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Equine Behaviour @ team @ |
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6010 |
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McComb, K.; Moss, C.; Sayialel, S.; Baker, L. |
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Title |
Unusually extensive networks of vocal recognition in African elephants |
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2000 |
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Anim Behav |
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59 |
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Equine Behaviour @ team @ McComb2000 |
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6281 |
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Proops, L.; Grounds, K.; Smith, A.V.; McComb, K. |
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Title |
Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited |
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2018 |
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Current Biology |
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28 |
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9 |
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1428-1432.e4 |
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affective processing; face processing; ; animal-human interaction; interspecific communication; animal memory |
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Summary For humans, facial expressions are important social signals, and how we perceive specific individuals may be influenced by subtle emotional cues that they have given us in past encounters. A wide range of animal species are also capable of discriminating the emotions of others through facial expressions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], and it is clear that remembering emotional experiences with specific individuals could have clear benefits for social bonding and aggression avoidance when these individuals are encountered again. Although there is evidence that non-human animals are capable of remembering the identity of individuals who have directly harmed them [6, 7], it is not known whether animals can form lasting memories of specific individuals simply by observing subtle emotional expressions that they exhibit on their faces. Here we conducted controlled experiments in which domestic horses were presented with a photograph of an angry or happy human face and several hours later saw the person who had given the expression in a neutral state. Short-term exposure to the facial expression was enough to generate clear differences in subsequent responses to that individual (but not to a different mismatched person), consistent with the past angry expression having been perceived negatively and the happy expression positively. Both humans were blind to the photograph that the horses had seen. Our results provide clear evidence that some non-human animals can effectively eavesdrop on the emotional state cues that humans reveal on a moment-to-moment basis, using their memory of these to guide future interactions with particular individuals. |
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0960-9822 |
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Equine Behaviour @ team @ |
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6394 |
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