Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes
Accurately determining the proper captive environment for apes requires adequately assessing the psychological similarities between apes and humans. Scientists currently believe apes lack mental complexity (Millikan, 2006), raising questions concerning the evolution of human culture from ape-like societies (Tomasello, 1999) .A long-term cultural study with bonobos suggests less intellectual divergence from humans than currently postulated […]
Perception of real-world without a language
The aim of this study is to show how real-world knowledge works without language. Lelio is a 76-year-old man who has been profoundly deaf since birth like his mother and brothers. In the clinical history, Lelio’s father was reported as affected by an unspecified “cerebropathy”. Lelio’s two brothers had a relatively normal life. Lelio is […]
Using information theory to assess the diversity, complexity, and development of communicative repertoires
The application of quantitative and comparative measures from information theory on animal communication can provide novel insights into the ecological, environmental, social, and contextual properties that shape the structure, organization, and function of signal repertoires. Using 2 phylogenetically different mammalian species that share similar ecological and social constraints as examples, the authors quantitatively examined the […]
Relational Matching in Baboons (Papio papio) With Reduced Grouping Requirements
Analogical reasoning is a corner stone of human cognition, but the phylogenetic origins of this skill are still unknown. Recent animal studies have suggested that only apes can solve the 2- by 2-item relational matching (RMTS) analogy problem, with potential benefits of language- (Premack, 1983) or token-training procedures (Thompson, Oden, & Boysen, 1997). In this […]
Ape consciousness-human consciousness- a perspective informed by language and culture
Animal consciousness has long been assumed to be a nonviable arena of investigation. At best, it was thought that any indications of such consciousness, should it exist, would not be interpretable by our species. Recent work in the field of language competencies with bonobos has laid this conception open to serious challenge. This paper reviews […]
The development of behaviour- trends since Tinbergen (1963)
Niko Tinbergen (1963) put behavioural development on the map as one of the four main problems in behavioural biology. Developmental research at the time was still in the grip of the nature/nurture debate. In his discussion, Tinbergen advocated an interactionist approach to development, which has been the main point of view in developmental research since […]
Words-what are they, and do animals have them?
Since the word is not a well-defined entity like the sentence, one looks for findings that may help to clarify it. The effect of nonsense words on the young child’s sorting of taxonomic versus thematic alternatives is said to be such a finding. A young child given, say, duck as a sample, goose and nest […]
Sexual stereotypes: the case of sexual cannibalism
There is a long-standing debate within the field of sexual selection regarding the potential projection of stereotypical sex roles onto animals by researchers. It has been argued that this anthropomorphic view may be hampering research in this area, for example by prioritizing the study of male sexual adaptations over female ones. We investigated how males […]
Structured bimanual actions and hand transfers reveal population-level right-handedness in captive gorillas
There is a common prevailing perception that humans possess a species-unique population-level right-hand bias that has evolutionary links with language. New theories suggest that an early evolutionary division of cognitive function gave rise to a left-hemisphere bias for behaviours underpinned by structured sequences of actions. However, studies of great ape handedness have generated inconsistent results […]