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Sueur, C., Jacobs, A., Amblard, F., Petit, O., & King, A. J. (2010). How can social network analysis improve the study of primate behavior? Am. J. Primatol., 73(8), 703–719.
Abstract: Abstract When living in a group, individuals have to make trade-offs, and compromise, in order to balance the advantages and disadvantages of group life. Strategies that enable individuals to achieve this typically affect inter-individual interactions resulting in nonrandom associations. Studying the patterns of this assortativity using social network analyses can allow us to explore how individual behavior influences what happens at the group, or population level. Understanding the consequences of these interactions at multiple scales may allow us to better understand the fitness implications for individuals. Social network analyses offer the tools to achieve this. This special issue aims to highlight the benefits of social network analysis for the study of primate behaviour, assessing it's suitability for analyzing individual social characteristics as well as group/population patterns. In this introduction to the special issue, we first introduce social network theory, then demonstrate with examples how social networks can influence individual and collective behaviors, and finally conclude with some outstanding questions for future primatological research. Am. J. Primatol. 73:703?719, 2011. ? 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
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Massen, J., Sterck, E., & de Vos, H. (2010). Close social associations in animals and humans: functions and mechanisms of friendship (Vol. 147).
Abstract: Both humans and group-living animals associate and behave affiliatively more with some individuals than others. Human friendship has long been acknowledged, and recently scientists studying animal behaviour have started using the term friendship for close social associates in animals. Yet, while biologists describe friends as social tools to enhance fitness, social scientists describe human friendship as unconditional. We investigate whether these different descriptions reflect true differences in human friendship and animal close social associations or are a by-product of different research approaches: namely social scientists focussing on proximate and biologists on ultimate explanations. We first stress the importance of similar measures to determine close social associations, thereafter examine their ultimate benefits and proximate motivations, and discuss the latest findings on the central-neural regulation of social bonds. We conclude that both human friendship and animal close social associations are ultimately beneficial. On the proximate level, motivations for friendship in humans and for close social associations in animals are not necessarily based on benefits and are often unconditional. Moreover, humans share with many animals a similar physiological basis of sociality. Therefore, biologists and social scientist describe the same phenomenon, and the use of the term friendship for animals seems justified.
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Whitehead, H. (2009). SOCPROG programs: analysing animal social structures. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol., 63(5), 765–778.
Abstract: Abstract SOCPROG is a set of programs which analyses data on animal associations. Data usually come from observations of the social behaviour of individually identifiable animals. Associations among animals, sampling periods, restrictions on the data and association indices can be defined very flexibly. SOCPROG can analyse data sets including 1,000 or more individuals. Association matrices are displayed using sociograms, principal coordinates analysis, multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses. Permutation tests, Mantel and related tests and matrix correlation methods examine hypotheses about preferred associations among individuals and classes of individual. Weighted network statistics are calculated and can be tested against null hypotheses. Temporal analyses include displays of lagged association rates (rates of reassociation following an association). Models can be fitted to lagged association rates. Multiple association measures, including measures produced by other programs such as genetic or range use data, may be analysed using Mantel tests and principal components analysis. SOCPROG also performs mark-recapture population analyses and movement analyses. SOCPROG is written in the programming language MATLAB and may be downloaded free from the World Wide Web.
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Gácsi, M., Kara, E., Belényi, B., Topál, J., & Miklósi, Á. (2009). The effect of development and individual differences in pointing comprehension of dogs. Anim. Cogn., 12(3), 471–479.
Abstract: In spite of the rather different procedures actually used in comparative studies to test the ability of different species to rely on the human pointing gesture, there is no debate on the high performance of dogs in such tasks. Very little is known, however, on the course through which they acquire this ability or the probable factors influencing the process. Important developmental questions have remained unsolved and also some methodological concerns should be addressed before we can convincingly argue for one interpretation or another. In this study we tested 180 dogs of different age (from 2 months to adults) to investigate their performance in the human distal momentary pointing gesture. The results, analyzed at both the group and the individual levels, showed no difference in the performance according to age, indicating that in dogs the comprehension of the human pointing may require only very limited and rapid early learning to fully develop. Interestingly, neither the keeping conditions nor the time spent in active interaction with the owner, and not even some special (agility) training for using human visual cues, had significant effect on the success and explained individual differences. The performance of the dogs was rather stable over time: during the 20 trials within a session and even when subsamples of different age were repeatedly tested. Considering that in spite of the general success at the group level, more than half of the dogs were not successful at the individual level, we revealed alternative “decision-making rules” other than following the pointing gesture of the experimenter.
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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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Whitehead, H. (2008). Precision and power in the analysis of social structure using associations. Anim. Behav., 75(3), 1093–1099.
Abstract: I develop guidelines for assessing the precision and power of statistical techniques that are frequently used to study nonhuman social systems using observed dyadic associations. Association indexes estimate the proportion of time that two individuals are associated. Binomial approximation and nonparametric bootstrap methods produce similar estimates of the precision of association indexes. For a mid-range (0.4-0.9) association index to have a standard error of less than 0.1 requires about 15 observations of the pair associated, and for it to be less than 0.05, this rises to 50 observations. The coefficient of variation among dyads of the proportion of time that pairs of individuals are actually associated describes social differentiation (S), and this may be estimated from association data using maximum likelihood. With a poorly differentiated population (S~0.2), a data set needs about five observed associations per dyad to achieve a correlation between true and estimated association indexes of r=~0.4. It requires about 10 times as much data to achieve a representation with r=~0.8. Permutation tests usually reject the null hypothesis that individuals have no preferred associates when S2H>5, where H is the mean number of observed associations per individual. Thus most situations require substantial numbers of observations of associations to give useful portrayals of social systems, and sparse association data inform only when social differentiation is high.
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Lansade, L., Bouissou, M. - F., & Erhard, H. W. (2008). Reactivity to isolation and association with conspecifics: A temperament trait stable across time and situations. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 106(2-4), 355–373.
Abstract: A temperament trait is generally defined as individual differences in behaviour that are present early in life and relatively stable across situations and over time. The aim of this study was to test the existence of a trait <<gregariousness>> in horses, by testing the stability across situations and over time of the responses to different social events. Sixty-six Welsh ponies and 44 Anglo-Arab horses were successively tested at 8 months and 1.5 years of age. Among them, 33 ponies and 21 horses were also tested at 2.5 years of age. They were submitted to four test situations: isolation and separation from, attraction towards and passing conspecifics. We carried out the analysis using each of four test groups as a unit (e.g. 33 Welsh ponies born in 2001, tested in isolation). Isolation and separation stood out as tests that showed a high consistency within test, across tests and across time. The most interesting behavioural parameter was the frequency of neighing, which was well correlated with other parameters measured in the same tests, such as defecation, locomotion and vigilance, as well as across the 3 years (e.g. for separation test: 0.41 < R < 0.61). Therefore, the behaviour of neighing observed in separation or isolation tests as early as 8 months of age appears to be a good indicator of similar behaviour in similar situations later in life, but also of other behaviours which can render the horse difficult to use. No parameter recorded during the attraction test presented stability across situations and time: the reactions to this test were not the expression of a stable characteristic of the individual and did not reflect the same characteristic as the three other tests. Of the different parameters recorded during the passing conspecifics test, the time to cross the arrival line near conspecifics showed good stability across years (0.35 < R < 0.68). This parameter was also correlated with many others recorded during the same test, and also, to a certain extent, to the frequency of neighing in the isolation and separation tests. This stability across responses expressed in various social contexts, and this stability over time, from 8 months to 2.5 years of age suggest the existence of a trait of gregariousness in the horse. From a practical point of view, that means it is possible to estimate the level of gregariousness of a horse as early as 8 months of age. Furthermore, additional analysis shows that gregariousness decreases with age.
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Boughner, R. L., & Papini, M. R. (2006). Appetitive latent inhibition in rats: preexposure performance does not predict conditioned performance. Behav. Process., 72(1), 42–51.
Abstract: Nonreinforced preexposure to a conditioned stimulus impairs subsequent conditioning with that stimulus. The goal of these studies was to assess the extent to which acquisition performance could be predicted from preexposure performance using a correlational approach. For both preexposure and autoshaping, four measures of performance were computed, including overall average lever pressing, lever pressing in the initial session, percentage change in lever pressing, and slopes. These measures were correlated in a large sample of rats trained in an autoshaping situation. None of the three measures of autoshaping performance was consistently predicted by any of the three measures of preexposure performance. These results are consistent with the view that latent inhibition is not reducible to long-term habituation.
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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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Pickens, C. L., & Holland, P. C. (2004). Conditioning and cognition. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 28(7), 651–661.
Abstract: Animals' abilities to use internal representations of absent objects to guide adaptive behavior and acquire new information, and to represent multiple spatial, temporal, and object properties of complex events and event sequences, may underlie many aspects of human perception, memory, and symbolic thought. In this review, two classes of simple associative learning tasks that address these core cognitive capacities are discussed. The first set, including reinforcer revaluation and mediated learning procedures, address the power of Pavlovian conditioned stimuli to gain access, through learning, to representations of upcoming events. The second set of investigations concern the construction of complex stimulus representations, as illustrated in studies of contextual learning, the conjunction of explicit stimulus elements in configural learning procedures, and recent studies of episodic-like memory. The importance of identifying both cognitive process and brain system bases of performance in animal models is emphasized.
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