IQ. Ennui. Rire. Douleur. Jalousie, envie, egalite. Emotion. Comprehension de l'humain. Desole pour nous. Conscience. Lemur Week: Numerical Cognition and Hidden Grapes – The Thoughtful Animal. Behold! The second installment of the Science Online Lemur Cognition series. If you missed the first installment, you should check out the cyborg lemurs of the Duke Lemur Center. There’s some pretty good evidence that numerical cognition emerged fairly early in the primate lineage, at least, if not significantly earlier in evolution.
Most of the work on numerical cognition in non-human primates, however, has focused on a handful of monkey and ape species. The prosimian suborder of primates, however, which includes lemurs, diverged from the main primate lineage some 47-54 million years ago. If the numerical abilities of lemurs parallel the numerical abilities of other non-human primates (such as rhesus macaques or chimpanzees, for example), then it may be possible to infer that numerical cognition in emerged prior to the divergence of lemurs, lorises, and galagos (the prosimians). Until just a few years ago, there had been no systematic research of numerical cognition in lemurs. Clinique Amis-Maux Inc., clinique multidisciplinaire privée en psychologie, orientation, orthophonie, orthopédagogie, ergothérapie et zoothérapie.
Another reason dogs rule: They know what you're thinking. Knode family Crystal Knode says her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Rachel, shown with her 15-year-old daughter, Alex, pays close attention to the family and "anticipates what is going to happen. " By Linda Carroll Scientists have finally proven what every dog owner knows – our canine friends read our facial expressions like dedicated detectives. Dogs don’t just depend on verbal commands to figure out what we want, a new study shows. Instead, they look into our eyes and try to guess what we’re up to, according to the study published in Current Biology. Hungarian researchers showed that dogs will even follow our gaze if we make eye contact with them first. This study “reveals that dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously only attributed only to 6-month-old human infants,” said study co-author Jozsef Topal a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Topal and his colleagues studied 29 canines. There have been similar experiments in babies, Topal said. Can Animals Be Mentally Ill? Dogs steal more food when nobody is looking, study finds. Dogs steal significantly more food when the room is dark, so humans can’t catch them in the act, a study shows. The results indicate that dogs understand the human perspective and take into account what the human can or cannot see, according to Dr. Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth. In the study, involving 28 dogs (14 females and 14 males) of various breeds and ages, a piece of food was placed on the ground and the dog was ordered not to take it.
Then the human started paying less and less attention to the food and the lights were turned off. The results indicated it was the dark and not the human that affected the dogs’ behaviour in stealing the food, the author found. Dogs stole considerably less when the human had his or her eyes open compared to all other conditions, Kaminski found.
“The current finding therefore raises the possibility that dogs take into account the human’s visual access to the food while they are making the decision to steal it,” Kaminski wrote. Do Pets Get Depressed? As our dogs and cats have migrated from the barnyard to the backyard to the kitchen to the bed, we veterinarians have noticed that sometimes the concerns of our clients seem to be more human in nature when talking about our four-legged family members. Before, when someone said to me that a dog or cat was “depressed,” I’d figure they meant he was lethargic, one of the many vague symptoms of what we veterinarians call the ADR (“Ain’t Doing Right") pet. But now, chances are decent they’re talking about the possibility of a mental illness and are worried that their pet may be clinically depressed.
I think it's possible pets can be depressed. After all, we know that depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain that’s treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I think it’s reasonable to think that this chemical imbalance occurs in animals other than humans. Do I know that based on research findings? Antidepressants are used in veterinary medicine, of course. Dogs understand gestures as well as toddlers - Health - Pet health. Dogs understand human perspective, say researchers. 11 February 2013Last updated at 09:03 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Dogs can understand a human perspective, say researchers Dogs are more capable of understanding situations from a human's point of view than has previously been recognised, according to researchers. They found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see.
This suggested the dogs were able to alter their behaviour when they knew their owners' perspective had changed. The study, published in Animal Cognition, conducted tests on 84 dogs. The experiments had been trying to find whether dogs could adapt their behaviour in response to the changed circumstances of their human owners. It wanted to see if dogs had a "flexible understanding" that could show they understood the viewpoint of a human. Dog's understanding Juliane Kaminski carried out the research into how dogs are influenced by human circumstances.
Companion Animal Psychology: Are young children more interested in animals than toys? At what age do children develop a fascination with animals? A brand new paper by Vanessa LoBue et al investigates young children’s interest in live animals. A set of three studies looked at young children in a naturalistic play environment in which they could choose to interact with animals or toys. The animals were always in an enclosure, so the children could only look at them and not physically touch them.
One obvious difference between animals and toys is that the animals move. It would be very difficult to control for this, so for the purposes of this research animals were chosen that did not move much. For example, since hamsters are nocturnal the hamster mostly slept through the interactions. The first study was an exploratory one involving children aged between 11 and 40 months. The results showed that children interacted more frequently with the animals than the toys, and spent more time interacting with the animals than the two most popular toys.
Reference. Companion Animal Psychology: Now where’s my treat? Trainers often advise owners to use treats to train their dogs, but some owners want to phase them out as fast as they can. Shouldn’t a dog be prepared to work for just verbal praise and affection? That’s the question asked in a recent study by Erica Feuerbacher and Clive Wynne – and they didn’t just test dogs, but wolves too! The question is interesting for practical reasons, since it’s useful to know how to motivate a dog if you want to train one. But it’s a very interesting question for another reason too. Some scientists have suggested that dogs are uniquely tuned in to human contact; in other words, that in the process of evolving from wolves, dogs have developed special abilities to read human emotions and communication. The study involved five separate experiments, four with dogs and one with hand-reared wolves. The experiments all used the same task: a simple nose-touch to the hand.
The results are fascinating. Reference Feuerbacher EN, & Wynne CD (2012). Do Wild Animals Suffer From PTSD and Other Psychological Disorders? About 15 years ago a woman in my advanced animal behavior course asked me if wild nonhuman animals suffer from PTSD or other psychological disorders. And just yesterday a therapist who works on human animals asked me if it's possible that wild animals don't naturally suffer from PTSD but only when they're mistreated by humans or experience family and friends tortured by humans. These are great questions to which there seem to be no good answers. Here's what I wrote in 2007 in my book The Emotional Lives of Animals about the possibility of wild animals suffering from various psychological disorders. "Because it's usually ignored, I want to pose a final question in this chapter: if animals feel many, if not most, of the emotions humans feel, can they also become mentally ill?
While we see emotions being freely and openly expressed in a wide variety of species, often there are individuals who seem be 'out of it.' "I remember other animals.