Inside the Animal Mind

In the field of tool use and animal reasoning, researchers tend to focus on primates or, in recent years, avian species'. However, what about the rest of the animal kingdom? We all have heard that an elephant never forgets, but could this actually be a disadvantage? Moti Nissani (2006), in association with Wayne State University, conducted two experiments with asian elephants to test their causal reasoning skill; that is, the ability to determine a causal relationship. To test this, in both experiments elephants were pertained to retrieve food from a bucket. They were then presented with a bucket that had a lid, from which they were supposed to remove the lid, then retrieve the food. The second experiment also had some elephants retrieving food from a depression in the ground covered by a box rather than food from inside a lidded bucket. This is where the two experiments differ. In both cases, the lid or box was set to the side of the bucket or depression respectively. If causa

Ducklings: adorable, tiny, fuzzy, and intelligent? Yes, these small yellow cuties are more than meets the eye when it comes to abstract thinking. What exactly constitutes a newborn duckling as an abstract thinker? A recent study which took place at the University of Oxford tested 152 newly hatched ducklings and their ability to use abstract concepts in the form of "imprinting." Imprinting is described as latching on to the first object seen after birth until the newborn becomes self-sufficient. In this case, ducklings were tested by being placed in front of a cube or sphere twenty-four hours after hatching and left to imprint these objects for thirty minutes. These objects were either of the same color or shape. These objects were then paired, either both of the same color or same shape, and introduced to the duckling along with a set of different looking objects. If the hypothesis of imprinting and abstract thinking followed through, the duckling should follow the im

Octopi: The Eight Armed Memory Machines   Gillian Jackson           While it is widely known that octopi and several other species from the class Cephalopoda contain above average cognition for animals of their size you can not help but wonder if they possess things that we as humans hold dear to our hearts. These things include abstract concepts (such as identifying shapes that have been rotated) and simple memory. To understand how complex an octopuses thinking is we first how to look at how complex their brain is.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLkKiVIBxXU     With such a large brain to body ratio, there has to be something more intricate going on right? Turns out they actually have the ability to use long-term memory. An experiment was conducted to test this where an octopus was trained to attack a white ball as a reward, then experiments taught them to avoid a red ball that was dropped in the tank. After a day or two, they would drop the red ball in the tank and to t

The animal mind is not so dissimilar to our own in terms of memory processing and storage as one might assume. Neural pathways are strengthened when humans practice using their working memory and it can be speculated that this is similar in animals as well. Stronger neural pathways allows our brain to become more efficient by transferring the working memory tasks, if done often enough, into our long-term memory to be retrieved easier later on. The importance of working memory in humans and animals gives us the power to streamline different tasks such as speech in humans or a fine motor task in chimpanzees or other animals .Working memory may be demonstrated well by allowing the chimpanzee in the video linked to try to reach the peanut in more than a single trial. This may give us some insight as to whether or not the neural pathways are being strengthened through practice and are being transferred to long-term memory over time. If this was the case, would this present the idea tha

A Goldfish's (and other fishes') Memory Maggie Oimoen              You've probably heard the story that . . . You've probably heard the story that goldfish only  have a memory span of about three seconds. Now if you were a goldfish, you shouldn't have noticed I started over, right? Not exactly. The thought of them having a memory longer than that may start to make their life in small fish bowl seem less bearable. There may be more to their "little" fish brains then you thought.  https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1b/51/c6/1b51c6ebfafdf078c3b6eedd41901a4b.jpg                                 The ability for goldfish to learn the difference between classical music types was studied looking at Bach and Stravinsky in particular. Kazutaka Shinozuka and other researchers at Keio University in Tokyo trained eight goldfish to distinguish between the two composers. There were four fish that were trained to bite a red bead for Ba

Elephants are often used as the poster children for animal memory abilities. This is usually because of their amazing ability to remember their fellow herd members and their migration abilities which require location and timing memory. But elephants may be even more impressive and possess more human-like mental qualities than you'd expect!  Picture from: https://www.livescience.com/27320-elephants.html Why do elephants have such impressive memories? Looking at the brain of an elephant gives clues as to why elephants are so good at remembering. The elephant has the largest brain of any terrestrial mammal (don't get too excited- think about how big their whole body is!). But, they also have a high EQ, which is the ratio between brain size and body size. An elephant has about a 2.30 EQ. For comparison, rabbits have an EQ of about 0.4, chimps are at about 2.49, while humans are around 7.44 (Jerison, 1974).  Anecdotal stories of elephants' memory abilities can be

Sunday, September 17, 2017 Can Animals Understand Abstract Concepts?                              What are abstract concepts? Abstract thinking   is a level of  thinking  about things that is removed from the facts of the “here and now”   http://coolsandfools.com/dogs-wearing-glasses-1/ Can animals understand these concepts? Dogs, seem to have better than expected abstract-thinking abilities. They can reliably recognize pictures of other dogs, regardless of breed, as a study in the July 2013  Animal Cognition  showed. The results surprised scientists not only because dog breeds vary so widely in appearance but also because it had been unclear whether dogs could routinely identify fellow canines without the advantage of smell and other senses. In a remarkable experiment last fall, researchers gave gorillas and orangutans touchscreens, presented them with a picture of an animal, and then showed them pictures of two other animals—one th

Have you ever wondered why you can not swat that pesky fly, or you can only get so close to that wild rabbit or squirrel before they run away? The reason is most likely because smaller animals see the world faster than humans do. There has been research recorded that correlates the size of a particular animal and how their eyes perceive light and time. According to another study, the research shows that b ody size and metabolic rate both fundamentally constrain how species interact with their environment. For example, in the realm of the predator and prey interactions, the ground squirrel may perceive itself as moving fast and being very agile where as the owl will clump many movements together and have a general perception of what the ground squirrel is doing.  Figure 1.  The ability of an organism to track a moving object depends on the time integral over which the individual can obtain its information. This is determined by its ability to resolve temporal information. In

       The Waggle Dance     Can bees actually perform elaborate dances?  Research continues to be conducted by scientists to better analyze a behavior seen in honey bees known as "the waggle dance". The waggle dance, consists of a variety of wing movements, abdomen shaking and movement patterns done by a forager bee in order to instruct other members of the hive where to find a bountiful source of food. In a recent study, however, researchers questioned if the bees were actually relying on the Earth's magnetic field (local geomagnetic field) when showing off their "dance moves". Studies have discovered already, that the waggle dance is performed a specific angle amongst the hive's honeycombs that is a correlation between the sun's position in the sky and direction of the food. Another factor honeybees use is sound pulses, in which the number of pulses communicates the distance to the nutrition source. To learn more about the waggle dance, cl