Bottlenose dolphins () display gaze alternation and referential communication in an impossible task.

Gaze cues play a vital role in conveying critical information about objects and locations necessary for survival, such as food sources, predators, and the attentional states of conspecific and heterospecific individuals. During referential intentional communication, the continuous alternation of gaze between a communicative partner and a specific object or point of interest attracts the partner's attention towards the target. This behaviour is considered by many as essential for understanding intentions and is thought to involve mental planning.

Penguins perceive variations of source- and filter-related vocal parameters of species-specific vocalisations.

Animal vocalisations encode a wide range of biological information about the age, sex, body size, and social status of the emitter. Moreover, vocalisations play a significant role in signalling the identity of the emitter to conspecifics. Recent studies have shown that, in the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus), acoustic cues to individual identity are encoded in the fundamental frequency (F) and resonance frequencies (formants) of the vocal tract.

Mirror stimulation in Eurasian jays ().

Mirror exposure elicits a wide range of behavioral responses, some of which have been considered as part of possible evidence of mirror self-recognition (MSR). These responses can range from social behaviors, indicating that an animal considers its own reflection as a conspecific, to mirror-guided and self-directed actions. Evidence of MSR has been found categorically in only a few species, such as in magpies, chimpanzees, horses, and elephants.

Episodic-like memory in common bottlenose dolphins.

Episodic memory involves the conscious recollection of personally experienced events, which has often been argued to be a uniquely human ability. However, evidence for conscious episodic recall in humans is centered around language-based reports. With no agreed upon non-linguistic behavioral makers of consciousness, episodic-like memory therefore represents the behavioral characteristics of human episodic memory, in the absence of evidence for subjective experience during recall.

Vocal accommodation in penguins () as a result of social environment.

The ability to vary the characteristics of one's voice is a critical feature of human communication. Understanding whether and how animals change their calls will provide insights into the evolution of language. We asked to what extent the vocalizations of penguins, a phylogenetically distant species from those capable of explicit vocal learning, are flexible and responsive to their social environment.

Investigation of mirror-self recognition in ravens (Corvus corax).

Large-brained birds, such as corvids and parrots, tend to fail tests for self-recognition (mirror self-recognition [MSR]), but the limited positive evidence for MSR in these species has been questioned due to methodological limitations. In the present study, we aimed to investigate MSR in ravens by performing three mirror tests: a mirror exposure test, a mirror preference test, and a mark test. Across all three tests, the ravens' behavior was not consistent with MSR.

Mirror-mediated string-pulling task in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius).

Mirror tasks can be used to investigate whether animals can instrumentally use a mirror to solve problems and can understand the correspondence between reflections and the real objects they represent. Two bird species, a corvid (New Caledonian crow) and a parrot (African grey parrot), have demonstrated the ability to use mirrors instrumentally in mirror-mediated spatial locating tasks. However, they have not been challenged with a mirror-guided reaching task, which involves a more complex understanding of the mirror's properties.

Cross-modal individual recognition in the African penguin and the effect of partnership.

An animal's ability to recognize another individual by matching their image to their voice suggests they form internal representations of other individuals. To what extent this ability, termed cross-modal individual recognition, extends to birds other than corvids is unknown. Here, we used an expectancy violation paradigm to determine whether a monogamous territorial seabird () can cross-modally recognize familiar conspecifics (partners or colony-mates).

Laterality preferences at rest and predatory behaviour of the Gyrfalcon (): An alpha predator of the sky.

Brain lateralization is generally considered adaptive for an individual and it can be ascertained, for example, by measuring the preferential use of limbs. Avian models have been extensively used to investigate the evolution and the advantages of brain lateralization. Birds of prey are a good model to study motor laterality, however to date they have been studied almost exclusively in the context of predatory behaviour.

Long-term stability of vocal individuality cues in a territorial and monogamous seabird.

The stability of individual acoustic features is fundamental in social species, and more importantly in monogamous and territorial species, showing long-term fidelity both to the partner and the breeding site. In this study, the stability over time of two discrete vocal types was investigated in the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus), a monogamous and territorial seabird. Contact calls and ecstatic display songs were recorded from an ex situ colony in 2017 and in 2020.

Convergent evolution of complex cognition: Insights from the field of avian cognition into the study of self-awareness.

Pioneering research on avian behaviour and cognitive neuroscience have highlighted that avian species, mainly corvids and parrots, have a cognitive tool kit comparable with apes and other large-brained mammals, despite conspicuous differences in their neuroarchitecture. This cognitive tool kit is driven by convergent evolution, and consists of complex processes such as casual reasoning, behavioural flexibility, imagination, and prospection. Here, we review experimental studies in corvids and parrots that tested complex cognitive processes within this tool kit.

Interpersonal difficulties in obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis to inform a rejection sensitivity-based model.

Obesity is associated with difficulties due to stigma and loneliness. These impact negatively on individuals' quality of life and behaviour change efforts. Increased sensitivity to others' negative feedback might play a role in the maintenance of these difficulties and could be addressed in psychological interventions.

Goats distinguish between positive and negative emotion-linked vocalisations.

Background: Evidence from humans suggests that the expression of emotions can regulate social interactions and promote coordination within a group. Despite its evolutionary importance, social communication of emotions in non-human animals is still not well understood. Here, we combine behavioural and physiological measures, to determine if animals can distinguish between vocalisations linked to different emotional valences (positive and negative).

Perceptual lateralization of vocal stimuli in goats.

Functional asymmetries, for example, the preferential involvement of 1 brain hemisphere to process stimuli, may increase brain efficiency and the capacity to carry out tasks simultaneously. We investigated which hemisphere was primarily involved in processing acoustic stimuli in goats using a head-orienting paradigm. Three playbacks using goat vocalizations recorded in different contexts: food anticipation (positive), isolation (negative), food frustration (negative), as well as 1 playback involving dog barks (negative) were presented on the left and right sides of the test subjects simultaneously.

Looking on the Bright Side of Livestock Emotions-the Potential of Their Transmission to Promote Positive Welfare.

Emotions can be defined as an individual's affective reaction to an external and/or internal event that, in turn, generates a simultaneous cascade of behavioral, physiological, and cognitive changes. Those changes that can be perceived by conspecifics have the potential to also affect other's emotional states, a process labeled as "emotional contagion." Especially in the case of gregarious species, such as livestock, emotional contagion can have an impact on the whole group by, for instance, improving group coordination and strengthening social bonds.

Motor asymmetry in goats during a stepping task.

Behavioural lateralization consists of perceptual and motor lateralization and provides adaptive advantages such as a general increase in brain efficiency. Motor laterality refers to the preferred use of either left or right limbs or organs to perform a specific task. We investigated motor laterality in goats (Capra hircus), using the First-stepping Task.

Studying emotion in invertebrates: what has been done, what can be measured and what they can provide.

Until recently, whether invertebrates might exhibit emotions was unknown. This possibility has traditionally been dismissed by many as emotions are frequently defined with reference to human subjective experience, and invertebrates are often not considered to have the neural requirements for such sophisticated abilities. However, emotions are understood in humans and other vertebrates to be multifaceted brain states, comprising dissociable subjective, cognitive, behavioural and physiological components.

Cross-modal recognition of familiar conspecifics in goats.

When identifying other individuals, animals may match current cues with stored information about that individual from the same sensory modality. Animals may also be able to combine current information with previously acquired information from other sensory modalities, indicating that they possess complex cognitive templates of individuals that are independent of modality. We investigated whether goats () possess cross-modal representations (auditory-visual) of conspecifics.

Judgement bias in goats (): investigating the effects of human grooming.

Animal emotional states can be investigated by evaluating their impact on cognitive processes. In this study, we used a judgement bias paradigm to determine if short-term positive human-animal interaction (grooming) induced a positive affective state in goats. We tested two groups of goats and trained them to discriminate between a rewarded and a non-rewarded location over nine training days.

Unexpected rewards induce dopamine-dependent positive emotion-like state changes in bumblebees.

Whether invertebrates exhibit positive emotion-like states and what mechanisms underlie such states remain poorly understood. We demonstrate that bumblebees exhibit dopamine-dependent positive emotion-like states across behavioral contexts. After training with one rewarding and one unrewarding cue, bees that received pretest sucrose responded in a positive manner toward ambiguous cues.

Goats excel at learning and remembering a highly novel cognitive task.

Introduction: The computational demands of sociality (maintaining group cohesion, reducing conflict) and ecological problems (extractive foraging, memorizing resource locations) are the main drivers proposed to explain the evolution cognition. Different predictions follow, about whether animals would preferentially learn new tasks socially or not, but the prevalent view today is that intelligent species should excel at social learning. However, the predictions were originally used to explain primate cognition, and studies of species with relatively smaller brains are rare.

Goats favour personal over social information in an experimental foraging task.

Animals can use their environments more efficiently by selecting particular sources of information (personal or social), according to specific situations. Group-living animals may benefit from gaining information based on the behaviour of other individuals. Indeed, social information is assumed to be faster and less costly to use than personal information, thus increasing foraging efficiency.

Space availability influence laterality in donkeys (Equus asinus).

Cerebral lateralization is the portioning of the cognitive functions between the two cerebral hemispheres. Several factors, like embryological manipulations, light exposure, health conditions, sex and age can influence the left-right brain asymmetries and contribute to increasing the variability in the strength and direction of laterality within most species. We investigated the influence of an environmental constraint, namely space availability, as a new source of variation on laterality in an adult vertebrate model, the donkey.

Illness as a source of variation of laterality in lions (Panthera leo).

Brain asymmetry--i.e. the specialisation of each cerebral hemisphere for sensorimotor processing mechanisms and for specific cognitive functions-is widely distributed among vertebrates.