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Ducatez, S., Audet, J. - N., Rodriguez, J. R., Kayello, L., & Lefebvre, L. (2017). Innovativeness and the effects of urbanization on risk-taking behaviors in wild Barbados birds. Anim. Cogn., 20(1), 33–42.
Abstract: The effects of urbanization on avian cognition remain poorly understood. Risk-taking behaviors like boldness, neophobia and flight distance are thought to affect opportunism and innovativeness, and should also vary with urbanization. Here, we investigate variation in risk-taking behaviors in the field in an avian assemblage of nine species that forage together in Barbados and for which innovation rate is known from previous work. We predicted that birds from highly urbanized areas would show more risk-taking behavior than conspecifics from less urbanized parts of the island and that the differences would be strongest in the most innovative of the species. Overall, we found that urban birds are bolder, less neophobic and have shorter flight distances than their less urbanized conspecifics. Additionally, we detected between-species differences in the effect of urbanization on flight distance, more innovative species showing smaller differences in flight distance between areas. Our results suggest that, within successful urban colonizers, species differences in innovativeness may affect the way species change their risk-taking behaviors in response to the urban environment.
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Malavasi, R., & Huber, L. (2016). Evidence of heterospecific referential communication from domestic horses (Equus caballus) to humans. Anim. Cogn., 19(5), 899–909.
Abstract: Referential communication occurs when a sender elaborates its gestures to direct the attention of a recipient to its role in pursuit of the desired goal, e.g. by pointing or showing an object, thereby informing the recipient what it wants. If the gesture is successful, the sender and the recipient focus their attention simultaneously on a third entity, the target. Here we investigated the ability of domestic horses (Equus caballus) to communicate referentially with a human observer about the location of a desired target, a bucket of food out of reach. In order to test six operational criteria of referential communication, we manipulated the recipient’s (experimenter) attentional state in four experimental conditions: frontally oriented, backward oriented, walking away from the arena and frontally oriented with other helpers present in the arena. The rate of gaze alternation was higher in the frontally oriented condition than in all the others. The horses appeared to use both indicative (pointing) and non-indicative (nods and shakes) head gestures in the relevant test conditions. Horses also elaborated their communication by switching from a visual to a tactile signal and demonstrated perseverance in their communication. The results of the tests revealed that horses used referential gestures to manipulate the attention of a human recipient so to obtain an unreachable resource. These are the first such findings in an ungulate species.
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Horowitz, A., & Hecht, J. (2016). Examining dog–human play: the characteristics, affect, and vocalizations of a unique interspecific interaction. Anim. Cogn., , 1–10.
Abstract: Despite the growing interest in research on the interaction between humans and dogs, only a very few research projects focus on the routines between dogs and their owners. In this study, we investigated one such routine: dog–human play. Dyadic interspecific play is known to be a common interaction between owner and charge, but the details of what counts as play have not been thoroughly researched. Similarly, though people represent that “play” is pleasurable, no study has yet undertaken to determine whether different forms of play are associated with different affective states. Thus, we aimed to generate an inventory of the forms of dyadic play, the vocalizations within play, and to investigate the relationship of affect to elements of play. Via a global citizen science project, we solicited videotapes of dog–human play sessions from dog owners. We coded 187 play bouts via frame-by-frame video playback. We then assessed the relationship between various intra-bout variables and owner affect (positive or neutral) during play (dog affect was overwhelmingly positive). Amount of physical contact (“touch”), level of activity of owner (“movement”), and physical closeness of dog–owner dyad (“proximity”) were highly correlated with positive affect. Owner vocalizations were found to contain different elements in positive- and neutral-affect play. One novel category of play, “tease”, was found. We conclude that not all play is created equal: the experience of play to the owner participant is strongly related to a few identifiable characteristics of the interaction.
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Cinková, I., & Policht, R. (2016). Sex and species recognition by wild male southern white rhinoceros using contact pant calls. Anim. Cogn., 19(2), 375–386.
Abstract: Recognition of information from acoustic signals is crucial in many animals, and individuals are under selection pressure to discriminate between the signals of conspecifics and heterospecifics or males and females. Here, we first report that rhinos use information encoded in their calls to assess conspecifics and individuals of closely related species. The southern (Ceratotherium simum) and critically endangered northern (C. cottoni) white rhinos are the most social out of all the rhinoceros species and use a contact call pant. We found that southern white rhino pant calls provide reliable information about the caller’s sex, age class and social situation. Playback experiments on wild territorial southern white rhinoceros males revealed that they responded more strongly to the pant calls of conspecific females compared to the calls of other territorial males. This suggests that pant calls are more important form of communication between males and females than between territorial males. Territorial southern males also discriminated between female and territorial male calls of northern species and reacted more intensively to the calls of northern than southern males. This might be caused by a novelty effect since both species naturally live in allopatry. We conclude that white rhinos can directly benefit from assessing individuals at long distances using vocal cues especially because their eyesight is poor. Pant calls thus likely play a significant role in their social relationships and spatial organization. In addition, better understanding of vocal communication in white rhinos might be helpful in conservation management particularly because of their low reproduction in captivity.
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Sommer, V., Lowe, A., & Dietrich, T. (2016). Not eating like a pig: European wild boar wash their food. Anim. Cogn., 19(1), 245–249.
Abstract: Carrying food to water and either dunking or manipulating it before consumption has been observed in various taxa including birds, racoons and primates. Some animals seem to be simply moistening their food. However, true washing aims to remove unpleasant surface substrates such as grit and sand and requires a distinction between items that do and do not need cleaning as well as deliberate transportation of food to a water source. We provide the first evidence for food washing in suids, based on an incidental observation with follow-up experiments on European wild boar (Sus scrofa) kept at Basel Zoo, Switzerland. Here, all adult pigs and some juveniles of a newly formed group carried apple halves soiled with sand to the edge of a creek running through their enclosure where they put the fruits in the water and pushed them to and fro with their snouts before eating. Clean apple halves were never washed. This indicates that pigs can discriminate between soiled and unsoiled foods and that they are able to delay gratification for long enough to transport and wash the items. However, we were unable to ascertain to which degree individual and/or social learning brought this behaviour about.
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Oliva, J. L., Rault, J. - L., Appleton, B., & Lill, A. (2015). Oxytocin enhances the appropriate use of human social cues by the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) in an object choice task. Anim. Cogn., 18(3), 767–775.
Abstract: It has been postulated that the neuropeptide, oxytocin, is involved in human–dog bonding. This may explain why dogs, compared to wolves, are such good performers on object choice tasks, which test their ability to attend to, and use, human social cues in order to find hidden food treats. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of intranasal oxytocin administration, which is known to increase social cognition in humans, on domestic dogs’ ability to perform such a task. We hypothesised that dogs would perform better on the task after an intranasal treatment of oxytocin. Sixty-two (31 males and 31 females) pet dogs completed the experiment over two different testing sessions, 5–15 days apart. Intranasal oxytocin or a saline control was administered 45 min before each session. All dogs received both treatments in a pseudo-randomised, counterbalanced order. Data were collected as scores out of ten for each of the four blocks of trials in each session. Two blocks of trials were conducted using a momentary distal pointing cue and two using a gazing cue, given by the experimenter. Oxytocin enhanced performance using momentary distal pointing cues, and this enhanced level of performance was maintained over 5–15 days time in the absence of oxytocin. Oxytocin also decreased aversion to gazing cues, in that performance was below chance levels after saline administration but at chance levels after oxytocin administration.
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Defolie, C., Malassis, R., Serre, M., & Meunier, H. (2015). Tufted capuchins (Cebus apella) adapt their communicative behaviour to human’s attentional states. Anim. Cogn., 18(3), 747–755.
Abstract: Animal communication has become a widely studied field of research, especially because of the associated debates on the origin of human language. Due to their phylogenetic proximity with humans, non-human primates represent a suitable model to investigate the precursors of language. This study focuses on the perception of the attentional states of others, an important prerequisite to intentional communication. We investigated whether capuchins (Cebus apella) produce a learnt pointing gesture towards a hidden and unreachable food reward as a function of the attentional status of the human experimenter. For that purpose, we tested five subjects that we first trained to indicate by a pointing gesture towards the human partner the position of a reward hidden by an assistant. Then, capuchins were tested in two experimental conditions randomly ordered. In the first condition—motivation trial—the experimenter was attentive to the subject gestures and rewarded him immediately when it pointed towards the baited cylinder. During the second condition—test trial—the experimenter adopted one of the following attention states and the subject was rewarded after 10 s has elapsed, regardless of the subject’s behaviour. Five attentional states were tested: (1) experimenter absent, (2) experimenter back to the monkey, (3) experimenter’s head away, (4) experimenter watching above the monkey, and (5) experimenter watching the monkey face. Our results reveal a variation in our subjects’ communicative behaviours with a discrimination of the different postural clues (body and head orientation) available in our experimental conditions. This study suggests that capuchins can flexibly use a communicative gesture to adapt to the attentional state of their partner and provides evidence that acquired communicative gestures of monkeys might be used intentionally.
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Merola, I., Lazzaroni, M., Marshall-Pescini, S., & Prato-Previde, E. (2015). Social referencing and cat–human communication. Anim. Cogn., 18(3), 639–648.
Abstract: Cats’ (Felis catus) communicative behaviour towards humans was explored using a social referencing paradigm in the presence of a potentially frightening object. One group of cats observed their owner delivering a positive emotional message, whereas another group received a negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate whether cats use the emotional information provided by their owners about a novel/unfamiliar object to guide their own behaviour towards it. We assessed the presence of social referencing, in terms of referential looking towards the owner (defined as looking to the owner immediately before or after looking at the object), the behavioural regulation based on the owner’s emotional (positive vs negative) message (vocal and facial), and the observational conditioning following the owner’s actions towards the object. Most cats (79 %) exhibited referential looking between the owner and the object, and also to some extent changed their behaviour in line with the emotional message given by the owner. Results are discussed in relation to social referencing in other species (dogs in particular) and cats’ social organization and domestication history.
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Cinková, I., & Policht, R. (2015). Discrimination of familiarity and sex from chemical cues in the dung by wild southern white rhinoceros. Anim. Cogn., 18(1), 385–392.
Abstract: Communication in rhinos is primarily mediated by the vocal and olfactory signals as they have relatively poor eyesight. White rhinos are the most social of all the rhinoceros species, they defecate at common dungheaps and the adult bulls use dung and urine to mark their territory. Chemical communication may therefore be particularly important in the social interactions of white rhinos, and its knowledge could be very helpful in their management and conservation. However, no studies have investigated up until now the olfactory discrimination in any rhinoceros species in the wild. We have experimentally studied the reactions of the wild southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) to the dung of familiar and unfamiliar adult females and adult territorial males. We registered the number of sniffing events, the duration of sniffing and the latency of the vigilance posture from the onset of sniffing. The dung of unfamiliar rhinos was sniffed longer than that of familiar rhinos. The rhinos showed a shorter latency of vigilance posture to the familiar dung of males than that of females. For unfamiliar dung, they displayed a shorter latency of vigilance posture to female than male dung. Our results indicate that the rhinos are able to discriminate the familiarity and sex of conspecifics from the smell of their dung. Olfactory cues could therefore play an important role in the social relationships and spatial organization of the southern white rhinoceros.
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Hopper, L. M., Price, S. A., Freeman, H. D., Lambeth, S. P., Schapiro, S. J., & Kendal, R. L. (2013). Influence of personality, age, sex, and estrous state on chimpanzee problem-solving success. Anim. Cogn., 17(4), 835–847.
Abstract: Despite the importance of individual problem solvers for group- and individual-level fitness, the correlates of individual problem-solving success are still an open topic of investigation. In addition to demographic factors, such as age or sex, certain personality dimensions have also been revealed as reliable correlates of problem-solving by animals. Such correlates, however, have been little-studied in chimpanzees. To empirically test the influence of age, sex, estrous state, and different personality factors on chimpanzee problem-solving, we individually tested 36 captive chimpanzees with two novel foraging puzzles. We included both female (N = 24) and male (N = 12) adult chimpanzees (aged 14–47 years) in our sample. We also controlled for the females’ estrous state—a potential influence on cognitive reasoning—by testing cycling females both when their sexual swelling was maximally tumescent (associated with the luteinizing hormone surge of a female’s estrous cycle) and again when it was detumescent. Although we found no correlation between the chimpanzees’ success with either puzzle and their age or sex, the chimpanzees’ personality ratings did correlate with responses to the novel foraging puzzles. Specifically, male chimpanzees that were rated highly on the factors Methodical, Openness (to experience), and Dominance spent longer interacting with the puzzles. There was also a positive relationship between the latency of females to begin interacting with the two tasks and their rating on the factor Reactivity/Undependability. No other significant correlations were found, but we report tentative evidence for increased problem-solving success by the females when they had detumescent estrous swellings.
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