Behavioural Methods to Study Cognitive Capacities of Animals.

Over the past 20 years, the scientific community has witnessed a growing interest in the comparative study of mental capabilities [...

Hybro chicks outperform Ross308 in a numerical-ordinal task. Cognitive and behavioral comparisons between 2 broiler strains of newborn domestic chicks (Gallus gallus).

Domestic chickens (Gallus gallus) are among those species subject to intensive selection for production. Among the most widely used broiler strains are the Ross308 and the Hybro. From the perspective of animal production, Ross308 were superior to Hybro in weight gain, final body mass, and feed conversion.

Sensitivity to the role of an animated agent from observed interactions in newborn chicks ().

Few month old human infants are able to detect the social roles of artificial agents and consistently choose the object behaving as 'approacher' rather than 'repulser'. This preference has been considered evidence of a pre-linguistic and pre-cultural origin of the social mind. Similar preferences have not been described in other species, though comparative data could help clarify the nature of this phenomenon and its evolutionary origin.

Study Replication: Shape Discrimination in a Conditioning Procedure on the Jumping Spider .

Spiders possess a unique visual system, split into eight different eyes and divided into two fully independent visual pathways. This peculiar organization begs the question of how visual information is processed, and whether the classically recognized Gestalt rules of perception hold true. In a previous experiment, we tested the ability of jumping spiders to associate a geometrical shape with a reward (sucrose solution), and then to generalize the learned association to a partially occluded version of the shape.