Communication as a Tool for Exhibiting Prosocial Behavior in Dogs.

Studies suggest that dogs exhibit prosocial behaviors toward humans and can rescue their guardians trapped in a box. We investigated whether dogs could communicate with an experimenter to gain access to a crying actor (the crying condition) who was visible but inaccessible, as she remained behind a fence throughout the test, or when she was simply speaking (the neutral condition). This experimenter was positioned to allow access to the actor, and the dog was free to move within the environment.

Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions.

Emotions are critical for humans, not only feeling and expressing them, but also reading the emotional expressions of others. For a long time, this ability was thought to be exclusive to people; however, there is now evidence that other animals also rely on emotion perception to guide their behaviour and to adjust their actions in such way as to guarantee success in their social groups. This is the case for domestic dogs, who have tremendously complex abilities to perceive the emotional expressions not only of their conspecifics but also of human beings.

How Do Dogs Behave When Presented with Situations of Different Emotional Valences?

Dogs are good models for studying behaviour and cognition as they have complex social capabilities. In the current study, we observed how human emotional valences (positive, neutral and negative) affected aspects of dogs' behaviour. We expected that dogs would exhibit more approaching behaviours in the positive condition and more signs of avoidance in the negative one.

Size, skull shape and age influence the temperament of domestic dogs.

Studies have investigated the relationship between dogs' morphological characteristics and behavioural dimensions, but little is discussed about this relationship in the context of dogs' responses to emotion eliciting stimuli and temperament. Based on the assumption that the developmental trajectory of behaviour and emotion processing is impacted by the interaction between organisms and environment, we analysed whether dogs' characteristics - that determine how they perceive and interact with their surroundings - affect temperament profiles. We looked at size, height, weight, skull morphology, age, sex, reproductive status, and breed of a sample of Brazilian domestic dogs' and their temperament (measured as Positive and Negative Activation), obtained via the PANAS questionnaire for dogs.

Effect of different experiences with humans in dogs' visual communication.

Dogs are particularly skillful in communicating with humans, and growing evidence points towards the importance of both species intertwined evolutionary history and intense daily partnership. Gaze alternation is a communicative behavior used by dogs from a very young age and is affected by factors such as aging and experience. We analyzed how different degrees of daily human interaction affect dogs' gazing behavior in the unsolvable task, where a desired food becomes inaccessible.

Dogs can infer implicit information from human emotional expressions.

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed.

Do Emotional Cues Influence the Performance of Domestic Dogs in an Observational Learning Task?

Using social information is not indiscriminate and being able to choose what to copy and from whom to copy is critical. Dogs are able to learn socially, to recognize, and respond to dog as well as human emotional expressions, and to make reputation-like inferences based on how people behave towards their owner. Yet, the mechanisms dogs use for obtaining and utilizing social information are still to be fully understood, especially concerning whether emotional cues influence dogs' social learning.

Group cohesiveness in children free-play activity: A social network analysis.

Despite the ethnic diversity and presence of Amerindian communities in all Brazilian states, the indigenous population suffers from a long process of invisibility and stereotyping. Aiming to increase interethnic associations, together with Mbya-Guarani leaders we promoted interventions in which indigenous and non-indigenous children shared free playtime. We hypothesised that free play activity would stimulate group cohesiveness, mitigating ethnic group avoidance in children's playgroups.

Interweaving social and manipulative development in early infancy: Some direction for infant caregiving.

Early infancy has been neglect not having the best opportunities to promote social motor and cognitive development. The maturational concept considering young infants as passive beings provide a misguided view of the developmental process. The human infant is an active being from the very beginning of life.

A review of the unsolvable task in dog communication and cognition: comparing different methodologies.

Communication between dogs and humans is a topic of growing interest, and the "unsolvable task" is a common method used to measure human-directed communication. In this task, dogs learn how to solve a problem to obtain a reward. After a fixed number of trials, the reward becomes impossible to access, arguably leading to communicative attempts from the dog.

Revisiting the fourth dimension of tool use: how objects become tools for capuchin monkeys.

Culture allows humans to adapt to a diversity of contexts. Participatory experience in technical activities and activity with artefacts provide the basis for learning traditional technical skills. Some populations of non-human animals use tools.

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil.

Human perception differs profoundly between individuals from different cultures. In the present study, we investigated the development of context-sensitive attention (the relative focus on context elements of a visual scene) in a large sample ( = 297) of 5- to 15-year-olds and young adults from rural and urban Brazil, namely from agricultural villages in the Amazon region and the city of São Paulo. We applied several visual tasks which assess context-sensitive attention, including an optical illusion, a picture description, a picture recognition and a facial emotion judgment task.

Mouth-licking by dogs as a response to emotional stimuli.

Dogs are able to perceptually discriminate emotional displays of conspecifics and heterospecifics and possess the cognitive prototypes for emotional categorisation, however, it remains unclear whether dogs can respond appropriately to this information. One way to assess associations between specific behaviours and the perception of emotionally competent stimuli is to look at other reliable measures that are related to cognitive and physiological processing. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm (Albuquerque et al.

Synchronized practice helps bearded capuchin monkeys learn to extend attention while learning a tradition.

Culture extends biology in that the setting of development shapes the traditions that individuals learn, and over time, traditions evolve as occasional variations are learned by others. In humans, interactions with others impact the development of cognitive processes, such as sustained attention, that shape how individuals learn as well as what they learn. Thus, learning itself is impacted by culture.

Eye Contact Is Crucial for Referential Communication in Pet Dogs.

Dogs discriminate human direction of attention cues, such as body, gaze, head and eye orientation, in several circumstances. Eye contact particularly seems to provide information on human readiness to communicate; when there is such an ostensive cue, dogs tend to follow human communicative gestures more often. However, little is known about how such cues influence the production of communicative signals (e.

Tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp) learning how to crack nuts: does variability decline throughout development?

We investigated the process of nut-cracking acquisition in a semi-free population of tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp) in São Paulo, Brazil. We analyzed the cracking episodes from monkeys of different ages and found that variability of actions related to cracking declined. Inept movements were more frequent in juveniles, which also showed an improvement on efficient striking.

Ontogeny of manipulative behavior and nut-cracking in young tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella): a perception-action perspective.

How do capuchin monkeys learn to use stones to crack open nuts? Perception-action theory posits that individuals explore producing varying spatial and force relations among objects and surfaces, thereby learning about affordances of such relations and how to produce them. Such learning supports the discovery of tool use. We present longitudinal developmental data from semifree-ranging tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) to evaluate predictions arising from Perception-action theory linking manipulative development and the onset of tool-using.

Repellent efficacy of formic acid and the abdominal secretion of carpenter ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) against Amblyomma ticks (Acari: Ixodidae).

Formic acid is a substance produced by some ants for defense, trail marking, and recruitment. Some animals are known to rub ants or other arthropods on parts of their plumage or fur to anoint themselves with released substances. A recent study with a semifree-ranging group of capuchin monkeys, Cebus apella L.

Watching the best nutcrackers: what capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) know about others' tool-using skills.

The present work is part of a decade-long study on the spontaneous use of stones for cracking hard-shelled nuts by a semi-free-ranging group of brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Nutcracking events are frequently watched by other individuals--usually younger, less proficient, and that are well tolerated to the point of some scrounging being allowed by the nutcracker. Here we report findings showing that the choice of observational targets is an active, non-random process, and that observers seem to have some understanding of the relative proficiency of their group mates, preferentially watching the more skilled nutcrackers, which enhances not only scrounging payoffs, but also social learning opportunities.