Life in a variable world: Behaviour, welfare and environmental design
Many or most stimuli in the environment are variable. Sometimes animals will categorize this variation, and we tend to underestimate the complexity of the mechanisms involved. Probably more often, response to variable stimuli is itself variable. Examples are explored in four areas, including the possibility that stimuli may occur in supernormal form: nest-site selection by […]
Eye white may indicate emotional state on a frustration-contentedness axis in dairy cows
Research on welfare indicators has focused primarily on indicators of poor welfare, but there is also a need for indicators that can cover the range from good to poor welfare. The aim of this experiment was to compare behaviour elements in dairy cows shown in response to a frustrating situation as well as elements shown […]
Use of exclusion by a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) during speech perception and auditory–visual matching-to-sample
An adult female chimpanzee showed responding through use of exclusion in an auditory to visual matching-to-sample procedure. The chimpanzee had previously learned to associate specific visuographic symbols called lexigrams with real world referents and the spoken English words and photographs for those referents. On some trials, an unknown spoken English word was presented as the […]