Beyond stimulus cues and reinforcement signals: A new approach to animal metacognition
Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that animals avoid difficult trials based only on reinforcement history and stimulus aversion. To explore this possibility, we placed humans and monkeys in successive uncertainty-monitoring tasks that were qualitatively different, eliminating many associative cues that might support transfer across tasks. In addition, task transfer occurred […]
The Learning of Exclusive-or Categories by Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and Humans (Homo sapiens)
A central question in categorization research concerns the categories that animals and humans learn naturally and well. Here, the authors examined monkeys’ (Macaca mulatta) and humans’ (Homo sapiens) learning of the important class of exclusive-or (XOR) categories. Both species exhibited–through a sustained level of ongoing errors–substantial difficulty learning XOR category tasks at 3 stimulus dimensionalities. […]
Prosocial behaviour in animals: the influence of social relationships, communication and rewards
Researchers have struggled to obtain a clear account of the evolution of prosocial behaviour despite a great deal of recent effort. The aim of this review is to take a brief step back from addressing the question of evolutionary origins of prosocial behaviour in order to identify contextual factors that are contributing to variation in […]
Long-term effects of infant attachment organization on adult behavior and health in nursery-reared, captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
This research traces the long-term effects on health, well-being, personality, and behavior of adult chimpanzees as a function of their attachment to a primary human caregiver assessed when they were 1 year of age. Of the 46 chimpanzees assessed at 1 year of age, we assessed health in 43 individuals, adult behavior in 20 individuals, […]