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Vallortigara, G., & Rogers, L. J. (2005). Survival with an asymmetrical brain: advantages and disadvantages of cerebral lateralization. Behav Brain Sci, 28(4), 575–89; discussion 589–633.
Abstract: Recent evidence in natural and semi-natural settings has revealed a variety of left-right perceptual asymmetries among vertebrates. These include preferential use of the left or right visual hemifield during activities such as searching for food, agonistic responses, or escape from predators in animals as different as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There are obvious disadvantages in showing such directional asymmetries because relevant stimuli may be located to the animal's left or right at random; there is no a priori association between the meaning of a stimulus (e.g., its being a predator or a food item) and its being located to the animal's left or right. Moreover, other organisms (e.g., predators) could exploit the predictability of behavior that arises from population-level lateral biases. It might be argued that lateralization of function enhances cognitive capacity and efficiency of the brain, thus counteracting the ecological disadvantages of lateral biases in behavior. However, such an increase in brain efficiency could be obtained by each individual being lateralized without any need to align the direction of the asymmetry in the majority of the individuals of the population. Here we argue that the alignment of the direction of behavioral asymmetries at the population level arises as an “evolutionarily stable strategy” under “social” pressures occurring when individually asymmetrical organisms must coordinate their behavior with the behavior of other asymmetrical organisms of the same or different species.
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Anderson, W. D., & Summers, C. H. (2007). Neuroendocrine Mechanisms, Stress Coping Strategies, and Social Dominance: Comparative Lessons about Leadership Potential. Ann Am Acad Polit Soc Sci, 614(1), 102–130.
Abstract: The authors examine dominance and subordination in the social psychology, political science, and biology literatures. Using Summers and Winberg (2006) as a guide, the authors suggest that extreme dominance or subordination phenotypes--including social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism--are determined by an organism's genetic predispositions, motivations, stress responses, and long-term hormone release and uptake states. The authors offer hypotheses about the likely neurochemical profiles for each of these extreme dominance and subordination phenotypes and suggest two designs that begin to test these hypotheses.
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Lachapelle, S., & Healey, J. (2010). On Hans, Zou and the others: wonder animals and the question of animal intelligence in early twentieth-century France. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 41(1), 12–20.
Abstract: During the second half of the nineteenth century, the advent of widespread pet ownership was accompanied by claims of heightened animal abilities. Psychical researchers investigated many of these claims, including animal telepathy and ghostly apparitions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, news of horses and dogs with the ability to read and calculate fascinated the French public and scientists alike. Amidst questions about the justification of animal cruelty in laboratory experiments, wonder animals came to represent some extraordinary possibilities associated with their kind. Psychologists speculated on the feats of wonder animals. They considered the possibility that these animals shared consciousness and intelligence with humans, and that--if confirmed--their alleged amazing abilities could lead to a new understanding of cognition for all animals. This article focuses on the few years during which claims of wonder animals occupied a significant place in French psychology and psychical research. It argues that as explanations involving deception or unconscious cues gained increased acceptance, the interest in wonder animals soon led to a backlash in comparative psychology that had repercussions for all animals, particularly those used in experimentation, in that it contributed to the decline of research addressing cognitive abilities in non-human species.
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Thackeray, J. F. (1988). Zebras from wonderwerk cave, northern Cape province, South Africa: attempts to distinguish Equus burchelli and E. quagga. Suid- Afrikaanse Tydsskrif vir Wetenskap, 84, 99–101.
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Vrba, E. S. (1985). Environment and evolution: alternative causes of the temporal distribution of evolutionary events. S Afr J Anim Sci, 81, 229–236.
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Lestel, D., & Grundmann, E. (1999). Tools, techniques and animals: the role of mediations of actions in the dynamics of social behaviours. Social Science Information, 38(3), 367–407.
Abstract: The definition of tool proposed by Beck (1980) is still the one referred to in ethology when discussing the question of tool-use in animals, and its pertinence is rarely questioned. However, observations on technical behaviours in animals have multiplied over the last 20 years, and these have profoundly altered our earlier representations. In the present article, we show that Beck's definition is insufficient and that it does not, in fact, work. More generally, we replace a theory of tools with a theory of mediations of actions to account for technical behaviours in animals. We show that a culturally overcharged notion such as that of tool hinders our perception of the diversity and the complexity of tool uses. By speaking of mediations of actions and not of tools, we eliminate the problem of first defining the pertinent object (is it a tool or not?) and are free to concentrate on the means by which the animal externalizes its actions and thus procures greater means of acting on these within a group. In so doing, we prepare the ground for a genuine evolutionary understanding of the dynamics of actions within a given animal population. Whereas, with a few exceptions, ethologists have always separated the question of techniques from that of social behaviour, we emphasize the importance of an ecology of mediations of actions for understanding the structure and dynamics of animal societies, in particular by attempting to rethink such notions as “culture” in the perspective of a general analysis of mediations of actions.
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Cox, G., & Ashford, T. (1998). Riddle Me This: The Craft and Concept of Animal Mind. Science Technology Human Values, 23(4), 425–438.
Abstract: This article examines the relations between methods used in both animal work and study and concepts of animal mind. By “animal work” the authors mean humans and animals working together, and by “animal study” they mean the discipline of ethology, especially the emerging area of cognitive ethology. Within these areas the wide range of conceptions of animal mind includes varying emphases on intelligence, forms of rationality and language, cognition, consciousness, and intentionality. The authors' central concern is to elucidate the vocabulary and the concepts which seem necessary to establishing successful working relationships with sheepdogs and gundogs. Their argument moves toward an emphasis on the appreciation of particular intentional states and recognizes that they invariably deploy elements of a moral vocabulary in achieving creative teamwork performances with dogs and other animals. The article concludes by consid enng the relevance of accounts of work with animals for associated considerations of intentionality.
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Rilling, M. E., & Neiworth, J. J. (1991). How animals use images. Sci Prog, 75(298 Pt 3-4), 439–452.
Abstract: Animal cognition is a field within experimental psychology in which cognitive processes formerly studied exclusively with people have been demonstrated in animals. Evidence for imagery in the pigeon emerges from the experiments described here. The pigeon's task was to discriminate, by pecking the appropriate choice key, between a clock hand presented on a video screen that rotated clockwise with constant velocity from a clock hand that violated constant velocity. Imagery was defined by trials on which the line rotated from 12.00 o'clock to 3.00 o'clock, then disappeared during a delay, and reappeared at a final stop location beyond 3.00 o'clock. After acquisition of a discrimination with final stop locations at 3.00 o'clock and 6.00 o'clock, the evidence for imagery was the accurate responding of the pigeons to novel locations at 4.00 o'clock and 7.00 o'clock. Pigeons display evidence of imagery by transforming a representation of movement that includes a series of intermediate steps which accurately represent the location of a moving stimulus after it disappears.
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Corr, J. A. (2004). Nuns and monkeys: investigating the behavior of our oldest old. Sci Aging Knowledge Environ, 2004(41), pe38.
Abstract: The use of nonhuman primates, particularly rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), as the best model for human physiological and cognitive aging is broadly accepted. Studies employing nonhuman primates to investigate behavioral changes that may occur with increasing age, however, are not common mostly because of the unavailability of appropriate subjects. Recent longitudinal human studies suggest that individual personality might play a large role in aging “successfully” and in the retention of high levels of cognition into old age. As a result of the demographic trend of increasing numbers of aged monkeys and apes in captivity, an opportunity exists to further investigate behavioral aging using the monkey model.
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Miller, J. A. (1985). Telling a quagga by its stripes. (extinct South African animal). Sci. News, 128, 70.
Abstract: If, in a mix-up at a costume shop, a couple were issued the front half of a zebra suit and the back half of a horse, it could be considered a quagga disguise. But if the masqueraders were pressed as to whether they were more horse or more zebra, the latest biochemical research advises them to insist on zebra.
The quagga, a South African animal extinct for more than 100 years, has been a source of confusion among taxonomists. Some contend, on the basis of the quagga skins preserved in museums, that this front-striped animal is a zebra, either a fourth zebra species or a variant of the Plains zebra, whose hindquarter stripes are dim. But others have argued that the quagga's teeth and skeleton indicate that its nearest relative is the true horse.
Biochemists joined the fray last year when muscle tissue was obtained from a salt-preserved quagga pelt in a West German museum. The tissue yielded both proteins and genes that could be analyzed (SN:6/9/84, p. 356).
Now the analysis has yielded some results. According to “remarkably concordant” findings on the proteins and on the genes, the quagga was a subspecies of the Plains zebra, says Jerold M. Lowenstein of the University of California at San Francisco. He looked at the binding between a sample of quagga proteins and mixtures of antibodies that bind to blood-serum proteins of each of the extant Equus species. The quagga sample bound more of the antibodies against Plains zebra serum than against the other species. Lowenstein calculates that the quagga relationship with the Plains zebra is six times closer than its relationship with the two other zebra species.
“We had to use special techniques to show the difference,” Lowenstein told SCIENCE NEWS. “There is 99 percent identity on the protein level. All the [Equus] species diverged within the past 5 million years, which is only yesterday in evolutionary terms.”
The quagga-Plains zebra relationship is further supported by the analysis of quagga mitochondrial genes performed by Russell Higuchi and Allan Wilson at the University of California at Berkeley. They find seven times as great a difference between quagga and Mountain zebra DNA as they do between quagga and Plains zebra DNA.
“Stripes, the molecules tell us, do make a zebra,” Lowenstein concludes in the July 18 NEW SCIENTIST, “and the half-striped quagga was a Plains zebra.”
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