Abstract: Synopsis
Does a young chimpanzee's gaze subjectively link it to the outside world? Is seeing “about” something to this species? This volume reports the results of fifteen studies conducted with chimpanzees and preschool children. The findings provide little evidence that young chimpanzees understand seeing as a mental event. Even though young chimps spontaneously attend to and follow the visual gaze of others, they simultaneously appear oblivious to the attentional significance of that gaze. This interpretation is consistent with three different possibilities: chimpanzees may experience a delay in psychological development; alternatively, they may possess a different theory of attention, connected subjectively through other behavioral indicators; or the subjective understanding of visual perception may only be present in humans.

Abstract: Product Description
Empathy has long been a topic of interest to psychologists, but it has been studied in a sometimes bewildering number of ways. In this volume, Mark Davis offers a thorough, evenhanded review of contemporary empathy research, especially work that has been carried out by social and personality psychologists.Davis’ approach is explicitly multidimensional. He draws careful distinctions between situational and dispositional “antecedents” of empathy, cognitive and noncognitive “internal processes,” affective and nonaffective “intrapersonal outcomes,” and the “interpersonal behaviora
l outcomes” that follow. Davis presents a novel organizational model to help classify and interpret previous findings. This book will be of value in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on altruism, helping, nad moral development.
About the Author
Mark H. Davis is associate professor of psychology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Abstract: What are the benefits that animals gain from living in a social group? This question has been the primary focus of the author's ecological interest. After many years of original and innovative research on the African buffalo, particularly at Lake Manyara in northern Tanzania, Herbert Prins has now summarized the results of much of this widely-respected work in this fascinating book. While advantages in reduction of the risks of predation or in increased efficiency of foraging on certain types of resources are now widely recognized, until now there has been less attention paid to the idea of the animals themselves as `information centres' and the extent to which the individual may be able to make use of information gathered by conspecifics, adjusting its own behaviour in response. Such a case-study has wide implications for research on social structure and organization in other species, and these are explored within the book. However, it is not a book aimed simply at the academic researcher, zoologist and behavioural ecologist; since it is written in a readable and accessible style, the book will also be enjoyed by wildlife enthusiasts, interested naturalists, wildlife biologists and wildlife managers.