Biology subjects

Krupenye, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Krupenye, C..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Expecting the unexpected: Great apes anticipate surprise in others

Humans adeptly navigate complex social environments by attempting to anticipate the actions and emotional responses of others. Although our closest ape relatives have sophisticated social cognitive abilities, we do not know whether they have a cognitive understanding of others' emotions. For the epistemic emotion surprise, a cognitive understanding would require sensitivity to an agent's belief, to reality, and to any misalignment between the two, allowing one to model the mental conditions that drive surprise. In a non-invasive eye tracking study with 31 chimpanzees and bonobos, apes showed evidence of a cognitive understanding of surprise: they detected the misalignment between an agent's belief and reality, exhibiting greater pupil dilation right before an agent encountered an unexpected outcome relative to an expected one. This suggests that apes and humans share a more complex understanding of others' mental lives than previously thought, capacities that likely evolved millions of years ago in a common ancestor.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

Rapid coordination of followership and leadership roles in homing pigeons navigating with unfamiliar partners

Collective movement requires coordination between individuals, yet how this emerges during early interactions remains poorly understood. We investigated how partner familiarity influences coordination, leader-follower dynamics, and learning in homing pigeon pairs navigating from novel sites. Birds were released repeatedly with either familiar or unfamiliar partners, followed by solo releases to assess learning. By quantifying bidirectional information flow, we found familiarity influenced information-transfer dynamics during the first release: familiar pairs exhibited more asymmetric information transfer, likely reflecting established leader-follower relationships, whereas unfamiliar pairs showed more symmetric exchange. These differences disappeared after one release. Conversely, familiarity had little effect on cohesion or navigational performance. There was some evidence for an influence on learning: birds from familiar pairings had higher homing efficiency on a subsequent solo release. Finally, across partnerships, followership was more predictable than leadership with respect to individual identity and flight speed, indicating stable variation in individuals tendency to follow rather than lead. This suggests that a shift in emphasis from leadership to followership might enhance our understanding of collective decision-making dynamics. Our results demonstrate how flight partners rapidly coordinate, producing limited downstream effects on navigation and learning, with implications for many animals that travel in fission-fusion transitory collectives.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

What is unique about the human eye? Comparative image analysis on the external eye morphology of human and nonhuman great apes

The gaze-signaling hypothesis and the related cooperative-eye hypothesis posit that humans have evolved special external eye morphology, including exposed white sclera (the white of the eye), to enhance the visibility of eye-gaze direction and thereby facilitate conspecific communication through joint-attentional interaction and ostensive communication. However, recent quantitative studies questioned these hypotheses based on new findings that humans are not necessarily unique in certain eye features compared to other great ape species. Therefore, there is currently a heated debate on whether external eye features of humans are distinguished from those of other apes and how such distinguished features contribute to the visibility of eye-gaze direction. This study leveraged updated image analysis techniques to test the uniqueness of human eye features in facial images of great apes. Although many eye features were similar between humans and other species, a key difference was that humans have uniformly white sclera which creates clear visibility of both eye outline and iris -the two essential features contributing to the visibility of eye-gaze direction. We then tested the robustness of the visibility of these features against visual noises such as darkening and distancing and found that both eye features remain detectable in the human eye, while eye outline becomes barely detectable in other species under these visually challenging conditions. Overall, we identified that humans have distinguished external eye morphology among other great apes, which ensures robustness of eye-gaze signal against various visual conditions. Our results support and also critically update the central premises of the gaze-signaling hypothesis.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Little evidence that Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) protect their caches by responding to cues about a conspecific's desire and visual perspective

Corvids appear to be capable of adjusting their behaviour according to anothers perspective, knowledge and desire. For example, Eurasian jays have been found to employ a variety of cache protection strategies to minimise cache loss by responding to cues about the visual perspective or current desire of an observing conspecific. However, it is not known whether these jays (or any other corvid) can integrate multiple cues about different mental states and perform the optimal response accordingly. Across five experiments, we found little evidence that our Eurasian jays responded to either the visual perspective or current desire of another agent. In Experiments 1 and 2 we investigated whether Eurasian jays can limit the risk of cache loss by responding simultaneously to cues about the desire and perspective of a potential conspecific pilferer. Building on established paradigms, we used opaque and clear barriers to manipulate the observers visual access to cache locations, and specific satiety to manipulate the observers desire towards different types of food. Across both experiments the jays caching pattern provided no evidence that they could integrate information about the observers desire and perspective. Moreover, the results were also inconsistent with the previously reported effects that jays protect their caches by responding to either the visual access or specific satiety of the observer independently. To gain further insight into these unexpected results, we conducted three more experiments. In Experiments 3 and 4, we attempted to replicate the previous finding that Eurasian jays prefer to cache behind an opaque barrier over a clear barrier when observed by a conspecific than when caching in private. In Experiment 5, we further investigated the previous finding that jays preferentially cache a type of food that had been eaten to satiety by a conspecific over a food that had not been eaten by the conspecific. Experiments 3, 4 and 5 found no significant effects in the direction of the previously reported effects, questioning their robustness. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for the field of corvid cognition and highlight several key issues that affect the reliability of comparative cognition research.

animal behavior and cognition↗