Hearing aid evaluation for music: Accounting for acoustical variability of music stimuli.

Music is an important signal class for hearing aids, and musical genre is often used as a descriptor for stimulus selection. However, little research has systematically investigated the acoustical properties of musical genres with respect to hearing aid amplification. Here, extracts from a combination of two comprehensive music databases were acoustically analyzed.

Review: Rethinking environmental enrichment as providing opportunities to acquire information.

Environmental enrichment, that is making the environment of animals more complex, was first designed to enhance the welfare and cognitive abilities of captive animals, and was more recently applied to farm animals. Enrichments can be sensory, physical, social, occupational, feeding-based, or a mix of these, with a view to improve animals' welfare. We posit that enrichments share the common factor of providing information to animals so that enrichment is all about providing the animal with a way to acquire information by interacting with the environment.

Interest in Humans: Comparisons between Riding School Lesson Equids and Assisted-Intervention Equids.

Little is known about the impact of equine-assisted interventions (EAI) on equids' perception of humans. In this study 172 equids, living in 12 riding centres, were submitted to a standardised human-horse relationship test: the motionless person test. Age, sex, type (horse/pony), housing, and feeding conditions of subjects were recorded.

Detecting Welfare in a Non-Verbal Species: Social/Cultural Biases and Difficulties in Horse Welfare Assessment.

Horses were domesticated for more than 5000 years and have been one of the most emblematic species living alongside humans. This long-shared history would suggest that horses are well known and well understood, but scientific data raise many concerns about the welfare state of most domestic horses suggesting that many aspects have been largely misunderstood. In the present review, we will examine some of the possible human factors that may explain the huge prevalence of welfare problems, despite horses being of special importance to humans.

EEG individual power profiles correlate with tension along spine in horses.

Assessing chronic pain is a challenge given its subjective dimension. In humans, resting state electroencephalography (EEG) is a promising tool although the results of various studies are contradictory. Spontaneous chronic pain is understudied in animals but could be of the highest interest for a comparative study.