Publications by authors named "Pele Marie"

Our study analyzes the effects of the permanent presence of cats on the health and social network of residents with pathologies in nursing home. Fifty-three residents, thirty-six caregivers, and four cats in three Alzheimer's Disease units ("ADU") and one Disability unit ("DISU") were observed for 180 hours. Social networks were created via instantaneous sampling of physical proximities and social exchanges between residents, caregivers, and the cats.

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Human behavior is influenced by the presence of others, which scientists also call 'the audience effect'. The use of social control to produce more cooperative behaviors may positively influence road use and safety. This study uses an online questionnaire to test how eyes images affect the behavior of pedestrians when crossing a road.

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Self-sufficient ideographies are rare because they are stifled by the issue of standardization. Similar issues arise with abstract art or drawings created by young children or great apes. We propose that mathematical indices and artificial intelligence can help us decode ideography, and if not to understand its meaning, at least to know that meaning exists.

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Animal cognition and ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour, have long captivated the human imagination [...

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Despite increasing numbers of publications showing that many animals possess the neural substrates involved in emotions and consciousness and exhibit agency in their behavior, many animals are still restrained and forced to take part in applied or fundamental research. However, these restraints and procedures, because they stress animals and limit the expression of adaptive behavior, may result in compromised findings. Researchers should alter their research paradigms to understand the mechanisms and functions of the brain and behavior so that the paradigms incorporate animals' agency.

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In recent years, computer science has made major advances in understanding drawing behavior. Artificial intelligence, and more precisely deep learning, has displayed unprecedented performance in the automatic recognition and classification of large databases of sketches and drawings collected through touchpad devices. Although deep learning can perform these tasks with high accuracy, the way they are performed by the algorithms remains largely unexplored.

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Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child's skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings.

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The place children live strongly influence how they develop their behavior, this is also true for pictorial expression. This study is based on 958 self-portraits drawn by children aged 2-15 years old from 35 countries across 5 continents. A total of 13 variables were extracted of each drawing allowing us to investigate the differences of individuals and environment representations in these drawings.

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Drawings have been widely used as a window to the mind; as such, they can reveal some aspects of the cognitive and emotional worlds of other animals that can produce them. The study of non-human drawings, however, is limited by human perception, which can bias the methodology and interpretation of the results. Artificial intelligence can circumvent this issue by allowing automated, objective selection of features used to analyze drawings.

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Objective: The Pedestrian Behaviour Scale (PBS) is a self-report questionnaire that distinguishes five dimensions of pedestrian behaviour: violations, errors, lapses, aggressive behaviours and positive behaviours. This study aimed to meet three objectives: to trace the development of the PBS worldwide from 1997 to 2021, to report on its varied uses and to analyse the scientific validation of the different dimensions of pedestrian behaviour reflected by the PBS and its derivatives.

Design/methodology: In this systematic literature review, we selected all works that cited the 2013 founding study of the PBS as well as all publications that cited the 2017 US validation of PBS which was frequently replicated around the world.

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This study analyses 749 drawings by five female Bornean orang-utans () at Tama Zoological Park in Japan. We searched for differences between individuals but also tried to identify possible temporal changes among the drawings of one individual, Molly, who drew almost 1300 drawings from 2006 to 2011. An analysis of the drawings was carried out after collecting quantitative and qualitative variables.

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Background: Perceived legitimacy associated with rules and authorities is an important element for understanding and encouraging compliance with rules in the field of road safety, often more so than with a deterrence approach. Despite a growing interest in legitimacy in recent decades and in the psychological field in particular, its definitions and measurements appear to be heterogeneous, subject to debate and in need of a common theoretical framework. Therefore, one can expect these limitations to also concern the definitions and measurements of legitimacy in the field of road safety.

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Techniques used in cave art suggest that drawing skills emerged long before the oldest known representative human productions (44,000 years BC). This study seeks to improve our knowledge of the evolutionary origins and the ontogenetic development of drawing behavior by studying drawings of humans (N = 178, 3- to 10-year-old children and adults) and chimpanzees (N = 5). Drawings were characterized with an innovative index based on spatial measures which provides the degree of efficiency for the lines that are drawn.

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Article Synopsis
  • Anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like characteristics to animals, varies among individuals based on their perceptions and specific animal species shown in videos of behaviors.
  • Participants evaluated videos of a sparrow, an elephant, and a macaque exhibiting care behaviors, as well as a robot dog, to measure their beliefs about the mental states of these entities.
  • The study found a 61% negative correlation between the mental states people attributed to animals and the actual capabilities of those species, highlighting differing views on animal emotions based on the observer's background and the species presented.
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For over a century now, a number of researchers have explored the evolutionary emergence of mark-making and drawing behaviors through studies in monkeys and apes, and particularly in chimpanzees. Their observations and results remain relevant to this day and underline the interest of this question and the questions that remain to be answered. The present review begins by retracing the historical timeline of this specific and challenging topic from the earliest anecdotal evidence to the first systematic studies in the 1930s.

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Road accidents involving pedestrians are a reality of urban life. Pedestrian risk is now well known and documented from the perspective of drivers. However, pedestrian behaviour plays a central role in road accidents, notably in terms of illegal road crossing at signalized intersections.

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The sociality of cattle facilitates the maintenance of herd cohesion and synchronization, making these species the ideal choice for domestication as livestock for humans. However, livestock populations are not self-regulated, and farmers transfer individuals across different groups. Individuals consequently have to adapt to different group compositions during their lives rather than choose their own herd mates, as they would do in the wild.

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Social information use is common in a wide range of group-living animals, notably in humans. The role it plays in decision-making could be a key to understanding how social groups make collective decisions. The observation of road-crossing behaviours in the presence of other individuals is an ideal means to study the influence of social information on decision-making.

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Interspecies sexual behaviour or 'reproductive interference' has been reported across a wide range of animal taxa. However, most of these occurrences were observed in phylogenetically close species and were mainly discussed in terms of their effect on fitness, hybridization and species survival. The few cases of heterospecific mating in distant species occurred between animals that were bred and maintained in captivity.

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Sociality is suggested to evolve as a strategy for animals to cope with challenges in their environment. Within a population, each individual can be seen as part of a network of social interactions that vary in strength, type and dynamics (Sueur et al. 2011a).

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This study describes a case of adoption by a female tufted capuchin (Sapajus spp.) who spontaneously adopted a newborn immediately after he was abandoned, then raised him successfully with her own infant. For 7 weeks, we observed the adoptive mother, the adoptee (3 days old at the time of adoption) and the biological infant (4 days old) in order to compare the behavior of the female towards each infant.

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Zentall and Smith (2014) have published a comment on Pelé and Sueur (Anim Cogn 16:543-556, 2013) in which they raise two issues, one about the definition of risk and a second concerning the optimality of decisions. When making a choice, subjects are faced not only with several possible alternatives but also with the risk of opting for an unsuitable choice which depends on several variables (context, internal state, knowledge and perception). Although it is true that animals might learn about their environment and adapt their decisions to the context and to their experience, strong constraints make some behavioural traits stable over individual lifetime and even generations.

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Network optimality has been described in genes, proteins and human communicative networks. In the latter, optimality leads to the efficient transmission of information with a minimum number of connections. Whilst studies show that differences in centrality exist in animal networks with central individuals having higher fitness, network efficiency has never been studied in animal groups.

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Non-human animals, including great apes, have been suggested to share some of the skills for planning that humans commonly exhibit. A crucial difference between human and non-human planning may relate to the diversity of domains and needs in which this skill is expressed. Although great apes can save tools for future use, there is little evidence yet that they can also do so in other contexts.

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