Biology subjects

Range, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Range, F..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Demonstrating inferential reasoning through behavioural choices: an experimental analysis

Is human language necessary for logical reasoning? Multiple studies address this by showing animals a bait hidden in either of two inverted cups, briefly lifting one exposing its content and then letting subjects choose. Consistent preference for the baited container is interpreted as evidence of inferential reasoning by exclusion ("if the bait is not here, it must be there"). More complex variations invoke metacognitive revision of hypotheses. We show that these protocols do not demonstrate logical reasoning. Instead, each event-stimulus elicits different actions and this suffices to choose correctly between them. We demonstrate this with experimental starlings and argue that other species may show similar behaviour, highlighting the need for careful controls when attributing high-level mental capacities such as reasoning or causal understanding.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Neophilia in wolves and dogs

The study of domestication provides a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of natural selection in the attraction towards novelty --known as neophilia. This is chiefly due to the fact that selective pressures acting on domesticated animals are often greatly diminished or at least very different from their wild counterparts. In this study, we investigated the neophilic levels of three canine populations differing in their level of contact with human environments both from an evolutionary and ontogenetic perspective: wolves, pack-living dogs, and pet dogs. In order to study their neophilic response, we presented the animals with two objects. The first of these objects was displayed in the animals enclosure for several days. After the animals were habituated to this first object, the second one was introduced together with the first one in a shorter test session meant to explore their preferences for either of the objects. We predicted that dogs --and pet dogs in particular to display higher levels of neophilia, since human-created environments tend to change at a faster pace, and thus, a higher drive to explore these changes would be more beneficial than in a comparably more stable environment. Our results show no apparent differences between the populations in terms of latency to approach the new object, nor in the identity of the object they approached first. Nonetheless, all populations interacted more with the new object during the test phase. Wolves did also interact longer with the object presented in the first phase of the experiment.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

Inference in wolves and dogs: The "cups task", revisited

Inferential reasoning --the process of arriving at a conclusion from a series of premises-- has been studied in a multitude of animal species through the use of the "cups task" paradigm. In one of the versions of this set-up, two opaque cups --one baited, one empty-- are shaken in front of the animal. As only the baited cup makes a noise when shaken, the animals can locate the reward by inferring that only a baited cup would make noise, that an empty cup would make no noise, or both. In a previous iteration of this paradigm in wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris), wolves seemed to outperform dogs. However, due to the lack of control conditions, it was not possible to assess each species inference capabilities, nor how they related to each other. The current study adds several conditions in which the baited cup, the empty cup, or no cups are shaken, in order to tackle this issue. Our results seem to indicate that wolves and dogs made their choices not based on inference but on the saliency and order of the stimuli presented, something that seems in line with the previous study. We discuss the potential causes behind the animals performance, as well as proposing alternative paradigms that may be more apt to measure inference abilities in wolves and dogs.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Going back to 'basics': Harlow's learning set task with wolves and dogs

To survive and reproduce, animals need to behave adaptively by adjusting their behavior to their environment, with learning facilitating some of these processes. Despite the fact that dogs were the subject species for Pavlovs original studies on learning, relatively little research has been done exploring dogs basic learning capabilities, and even fewer focused on the impact evolution may have had on this behavior. In order to investigate the effects of dog domestication on instrumental learning, we tested similarly-raised wolves and dogs in Harlows "learning set" task. In Experiment 1, several pairs of objects were presented to the animals, one of which was baited while the other was not. Both species performance gradually improved with each new set of objects, showing that they "learnt to learn" but no differences were found between the species in their learning speed. In Experiment 2 addressing reversal learning, once subjects had learned the association between one of the objects and the food reward, the contingencies were reversed and the previously unrewarded object of the same pair was now rewarded. Dogs performance in this task proved to be better than wolves, albeit only when considering just the first session of each reversal, suggesting that either the dogs had not learned the previous association as well as the wolves or that dogs are more flexible than wolves. Further research (possibly with the aid of refined methods such as touchscreens) would help ascertain whether these differences between wolves and dogs are persistent across different learning tasks.

animal behavior and cognition↗