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Held, S., Mendl, M., Devereux, C., & Byrne, R. W. (2001). Studies in Social Cognition: From Primates to Pigs. Animal Welfare, 10, 209–217.
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Byrne, R. W. (2007). Culture in great apes: using intricate complexity in feeding skills to trace the evolutionary origin of human technical prowess. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 362(1480), 577–585.
Abstract: Geographical cataloguing of traits, as used in human ethnography, has led to the description of “culture” in some non-human great apes. Culture, in these terms, is detected as a pattern of local ignorance resulting from environmental constraints on knowledge transmission. However, in many cases, the geographical variations may alternatively be explained by ecology. Social transmission of information can reliably be identified in many other animal species, by experiment or distinctive patterns in distribution; but the excitement of detecting culture in great apes derives from the possibility of understanding the evolution of cumulative technological culture in humans. Given this interest, I argue that great ape research should concentrate on technically complex behaviour patterns that are ubiquitous within a local population; in these cases, a wholly non-social ontogeny is highly unlikely. From this perspective, cultural transmission has an important role in the elaborate feeding skills of all species of great ape, in conveying the “gist” or organization of skills. In contrast, social learning is unlikely to be responsible for local stylistic differences, which are apt to reflect sensitive adaptations to ecology.
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Janson, C., & Byrne, R. (2007). What wild primates know about resources: opening up the black box. Anim. Cogn., 10(3), 357–367.
Abstract: Abstract We present the theoretical and practical difficulties of inferring the cognitive processes involved in spatial movement decisions of primates and other animals based on studies of their foraging behavior in the wild. Because the possible cognitive processes involved in foraging are not known a priori for a given species, some observed spatial movements could be consistent with a large number of processes ranging from simple undirected search processes to strategic goal-oriented travel. Two basic approaches can help to reveal the cognitive processes: (1) experiments designed to test specific mechanisms; (2) comparison of observed movements with predicted ones based on models of hypothesized foraging modes (ideally, quantitative ones). We describe how these two approaches have been applied to evidence for spatial knowledge of resources in primates, and for various hypothesized goals of spatial decisions in primates, reviewing what is now established. We conclude with a synthesis emphasizing what kinds of spatial movement data on unmanipulated primate populations in the wild are most useful in deciphering goal-oriented processes from random processes. Basic to all of these is an estimate of the animals ability to detect resources during search. Given knowledge of the animals detection ability, there are several observable patterns of resource use incompatible with a pure search process. These patterns include increasing movement speed when approaching versus leaving a resource, increasingly directed movement toward more valuable resources, and directed travel to distant resources from many starting locations. Thus, it should be possible to assess and compare spatial cognition across a variety of primate species and thus trace its ecological and evolutionary correlates.
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Bates, L. A., Sayialel, K. N., Njiraini, N. W., Poole, J. H., Moss, C. J., & Byrne, R. W. (2008). African elephants have expectations about the locations of out-of-sight family members. Biol Lett, 4(1), 34–36.
Abstract: Monitoring the location of conspecifics may be important to social mammals. Here, we use an expectancy-violation paradigm to test the ability of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) to keep track of their social companions from olfactory cues. We presented elephants with samples of earth mixed with urine from female conspecifics that were either kin or unrelated to them, and either unexpected or highly predictable at that location. From behavioural measurements of the elephants' reactions, we show that African elephants can recognize up to 17 females and possibly up to 30 family members from cues present in the urine-earth mix, and that they keep track of the location of these individuals in relation to themselves.
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Byrne, R. W., & Bates, L. A. (2006). Why are animals cognitive? Curr Biol, 16(12), R445–8.
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Byrne, R. W. (2009). Animal imitation. Current Biology, 19(3), R111–R114.
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Ruiz, A., Gómez, J., Roeder, J., & Byrne, R. (2009). Gaze following and gaze priming in lemurs. Anim. Cogn., 12(3), 427–434.
Abstract: Abstract  Although primates have often been found to co-orient visually with other individuals, members of these same species have usually failed to use co-orientation to find hidden food in object-choice experiments. This presents an evolutionary puzzle: what is the function of co-orientation if it is not used for a function as basic as locating resources? Co-orientation responses have not been systematically investigated in object-choice experiments, and requiring co-orientation with humans (as is typical in object-choice tasks) may underestimate other species’ abilities. Using an object-choice task with conspecific models depicted in photographs, we provide experimental evidence that two lemur species (Eulemur fulvus, n = 4, and Eulemur macaco, n = 2) co-orient with conspecifics. Secondly, by analysing together two measures that have traditionally been examined separately, we show that lemurs’ gaze following behaviour and ultimate choice are closely linked. Individuals were more likely to choose correctly after having looked in the same direction as the model, and thus chose objects correctly more often than chance. We propose a candidate system for the evolutionary origins of more complex gaze following: ‘gaze priming.’
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Farmer, K., Krueger, K., & Byrne, R. (2010). Visual laterality in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) interacting with humans. Anim. Cogn., 13, 229–238.
Abstract: Most horses have a side on which they are easier to handle and a direction they favour when working on a circle, and recent studies have suggested a correlation between emotion and visual laterality when horses observe inanimate objects. As such lateralisation could provide important clues regarding the horse’s cognitive processes, we investigated whether horses also show laterality in association with people. We gave horses the choice of entering a chute to left or right, with and without the passive, non-interactive presence of a person unknown to them. The left eye was preferred for scanning under both conditions, but significantly more so when a person was present. Traditionally, riders handle horses only from the left, so we repeated the experiment with horses specifically trained on both sides. Again, there was a consistent preference for left eye scanning in the presence of a person, whether known to the horses or not. We also examined horses interacting with a person, using both traditionally and bilaterally trained horses. Both groups showed left eye preference for viewing the person, regardless of training and test procedure. For those horses tested under both passive and interactive conditions, the left eye was preferred significantly more during interaction. We suggest that most horses prefer to use their left eye for assessment and evaluation, and that there is an emotional aspect to the choice which may be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances. We believe these results have important practical implications and that emotional laterality should be taken into account in training methods.
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Bates, L. A., Lee, P. C., Njiraini, N., Poole, J. H., Sayialel, K., Sayialel, S., et al. (2008). Do Elephants Show Empathy? J Conscious Stud, 15(10-11), 204–225.
Abstract: Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and 'babysitting' calves, aiding individuals that would otherwise have difficulty in moving, and removing foreign objects attached to others. These records demonstrate that an elephant is capable of diagnosing animacy and goal directedness, and is able to understand the physical competence, emotional state and intentions of others, when they differ from its own. We argue that an empathic understanding of others is the simplest explanation of these abilities, and discuss reasons why elephants appear to show empathy more than other non-primate species.
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Genty, E., & Byrne, R. (2010). Why do gorillas make sequences of gestures? Anim. Cogn., 13(2), 287–301.
Abstract: Abstract Great ape gestures have attracted considerable research interest in recent years, prompted by their flexible and intentional pattern of use; but almost all studies have focused on single gestures. Here, we report the first quantitative analysis of sequential gesture use in western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), using data from three captive groups and one African study site. We found no evidence that gesture sequences were given for reasons of increased communicative efficiency over single gestures. Longer sequences of repeated gestures did not increase the likelihood of response, and using a sequence was seldom in reaction to communicative failure. Sequential combination of two gestures with similar meanings did not generally increase effectiveness, and sometimes reduced it. Gesture sequences were closely associated with play contexts. Markov transition analysis showed two networks of frequently co-occurring gestures, both consisting of gestures used to regulate play. One network comprised only tactile gestures, the other a mix of silent, audible and tactile gestures; apparently, these clusters resulted from gesture use in play with proximal or distal contact, respectively. No evidence was found for syntactic effects of sequential combination: meanings changed little or not at all. Semantically, many gestures overlapped massively with others in their core information (i.e. message), and gesture messages spanned relatively few functions. We suggest that the underlying semantics of gorilla gestures is highly simplified compared to that of human words. Gesture sequences allow continual adjustment of the tempo and nature of social interactions, rather than generally conveying semantically referential information or syntactic structures.
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