Journal of Comparative Psychology最新文献

Apes require high volumes of energy-rich foods that tend to be patchily distributed, creating evolutionary pressures for flexible and complex cognition. Several species hunt mobile prey, placing demands on working memory and selecting for sociocognitive abilities such as predicting prey behavior. The mechanisms by which apes overcome foraging and hunting challenges are difficult to elucidate. Field investigations provide rich data sets but lack experimental control, limiting the gamut of questions they can answer, while experiments with captive subjects offer lower generalizability to real-world situations. Virtual environments (VEs) present a compromise, combining experimental specificity with proxies of realistic situations. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos moved through a three-dimensional VE using a touchscreen. All subjects learned to chase and catch moving rabbits, some exhibiting high success rates even in the presence of large obstacles. Success in trials with a first-person (FP) viewpoint was much higher than in trials presented from overhead, suggesting that the immersive nature of FP trials helped subjects to understand their location in the environment better than when they took a top-down view. Data were analyzed using generative computational agent models, identifying that subjects occasionally employed anticipatory hunting strategies, but more often used a direct chasing strategy. This study validates the use of VEs as an experimental paradigm, demonstrating that apes can understand the behavior of moving agents in situations of varying complexity and that computational modeling can be utilized to delve into behavioral data at a fine-grained level and identify which of several cognitive strategies they fit best. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In social foraging situations, some group members actively engage in behaviors associated with searching for patch zones (produce), while others join previously discovered patch zones (scrounge). Pavlovian conditioning enables individuals to anticipate a biologically significant event or unconditioned stimulus, such as resource availability, when paired with another event, such as a blue light, also known as a conditioned stimulus (CS). Considering that individuals' prior experiences with habitat features may influence their preference for producer or scrounger responses, this study aims to assess the impact of resource-associated signals on the group produce index. Specifically, the study seeks to (a) outline a setup for goldfish (Carassius auratus) incorporating renewable patch zones, (b) evaluate the CS's effect on the proportion of producers, and (c) develop an agent-based model capturing the CS's effect on the proportion of producers. Eight goldfish were used, with half undergoing a delayed Pavlovian acquisition protocol. Pavlovian-trained and control fish were assessed under signal and nonsignal conditions. The findings reveal that the producer index in the signal condition was higher for the Pavlovian group than the control group. To simulate conditions to those observed in fish, we developed an agent-based model where Pavlovian agents oriented themselves toward the nearest patch zone when the CS was present. The results mirrored those observed in fish, indicating an advantage derived from preexposure to the CS. This study contributes to the investigation of individual disparities and the impact of learning within the framework of the producer-scrounger game. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Memorizing the relations between items and learning relational rules are two ways in which sets of items can be ranked. We investigated the interaction of these types of learning in a series of five experiments with six adult male rhesus monkeys. We presented monkeys with three types of image sets. Scene sets were random images of natural scenes or cityscapes with no perceptually evident pattern by which to rank them. Relations among these images had to be learned through trial and error. Patterned sets were shapes that varied systematically along a physical dimension such as size such that a single rule for ranking them could be applied across images. Disordered sets were the same as Patterned sets, but monkeys were trained to rank them in an arbitrary order that was not consistent with differences along a physical dimension. Monkeys learned Scene sets more quickly than Patterned sets and Disordered sets, suggesting that monkeys memorize the relations between images relatively easily. In follow-up experiments, we found that monkeys also learned rules for the Patterned sets, indicated by the fact that they generalized performance to novel images and reversed ranks across the whole set after training with a single reversed pair. In Experiments 4 and 5, we investigated the interaction of memorization and relational rule learning with compound image sets that included both systematic physical variation and arbitrary visual content. We found further evidence that monkeys ordered images by both memorization and rules. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Photophobia, aversion for brightly lit environments, is commonly observed in laboratory nocturnal rodents such as mice and rats, as indicated, for example, by the light-dark box test. The universality of photophobia in laboratory nocturnal rodents rises questions on its corresponding behavior in nature and on what adaptive value may have led to the selection of this behavior during biological evolution. Nocturnality alone is insufficient to explain photophobic behavior, as nocturnal rodents show reduced roaming in the day just because they are sleeping and not because they are choosing to avoid a possibly aversive daylight. On the other hand, a natural behavior more directly related to the photophobia observed in the laboratory is selenophobia (moonlight avoidance), which in free-ranging rodents can be operatively defined as the reduction of exploratory and foraging activities in moonlit nights compared with dark nights. In the case of selenophobia, factors related to nocturnality are ruled out, and light-related factors can be easily isolated. Selenophobia has been found in a wide variety of nocturnal rodents, for which it may represent an antipredatory adaptation. A technology-aided study of selenophobia may strongly contribute to a better understanding of its nature, of the relative contributions of instinct and learning to this behavior, and of its neural underpinnings. In particular, new behavioral and neurophysiological technologies, for example, miniaturized radiocollars, freely accessible testing chambers equipped with infrared video cameras, animal-borne miniaturized video cameras, and noninvasive electrophysiological recordings, may be of particular usefulness to shed light on selenophobia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Song sessions produced by humpback whales recorded off the coasts of Hawaii and Colombia show recurrent patterns of acoustic variation across consecutive songs. Analyses of intra-individual variations within continuous song sessions revealed that songs consistently cycled through stages of acoustic complexity. At time scales spanning tens of minutes, cyclical variations likely reflected the diving behavior of singers. Changes over shorter time frames suggest that singing humpback whales may also systematically modulate the acoustic complexity of individual sounds during song production, both by gradually morphing units and by varying the number of times they repeat sound patterns. Comparable cycles were evident across years and populations. Cyclical variations within song sessions can reveal how much time and energy singers spend producing tonal versus frequency-modulated/broadband elements. Tonal components are generally more difficult to localize spatially but easier to detect over long distances, suggesting that singing humpback whales may dynamically vary sound production in ways that affect both sound transmission and auditory spatial processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

E. Rapport Munro et al. (see record 2025-97294-001) report on their use of a computerized task designed to mimic some aspects of the natural movements of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) around a virtual environment. Although far from being a great ape's real-life version of Ready Player One, this software offers a beginning point toward making more ecologically valid and natural environment-like settings for use in assessing spatial cognition and decision making. The continued refinement and use of tasks like those designed by Rapport Munro et al. (2025) is not exciting solely because such tasks will replace two-dimensional, third-person computerized tasks usedwith nonhuman animals or because it guarantees that the subjects who are engaging those tasks are genuinely feeling as if they are in real spaces. It is exciting because it is, yet again, a new tool being added to the toolbox available to comparative cognition researchers, and one that is going to be particularly valuable in asking and answering certain kinds of questions about how animals move through and represent spaces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Overimitation is a social learning mechanism in which an observer replicates the actions of a communicative demonstrator even if some of the actions in the process are functionally irrelevant. While many consider overimitation a uniquely human mechanism, some scholars have hypothesized that domestic dogs may overimitate because of their shared evolutionary history and pedagogical learning structures with humans. Previous literature has presented conflicting evidence regarding the presence of overimitation in domestic dogs. This study expanded upon work by Johnston et al. (2017) and directly compared 3- to 5-year-old children and domestic dogs on the same overimitation task. For both dogs and children, we demonstrated an irrelevant action followed by a relevant action and examined how often subjects reproduced this sequence across four trials. Consistent with an overimitation pattern, children reproduced the irrelevant then relevant sequence at a constant rate across four trials. However, dogs decreased the rate with which they reproduced this sequence across trials-a change which is consistent with a copy-all refine-later strategy or simple exploration. These findings support those in Johnston et al.'s (2017) study and further support the hypothesis that dogs do not overimitate like children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Oxytocin's (OT's) influence on social behavior is highly complex and dependent upon context. Here, we addressed a gap in the literature on how OT impacts the learning process in a purely behavioral study. We conducted a 2 (OT, placebo) × 2 (demonstration, no demonstration) study in which dogs received 35 IU intranasal OT spray and demonstrations of how to solve a food puzzle. We tested subjects' levels of engagement with the puzzle as well as with three social partners-the experimenter, the helper, and the owner-both while the dogs were being introduced to the puzzle and while the dogs were allowed to engage with the puzzle. During the puzzle introduction, dogs that received a demonstration increased their gaze toward puzzle and experimenter, and decreased gaze toward their owner as compared to dogs that did not receive a demonstration. When allowed to engage with the puzzle, dogs that received a demonstration gazed more at the experimenter and opened more drawers compared to those receiving no demonstration, although the difference in their general puzzle interaction only trended toward significant. Moreover, more female than male dogs gazed at the experimenter during puzzle engagement, and there was a strong trend for more male than female dogs to solve the puzzle. Finally, results showed only a modest effect of OT on social partner-directed behaviors, including a possible sex-specific effect, and no impact of OT on social learning. The difficulty of the puzzle, identity of the social partner, and dogs' perceptions of the puzzle opening demonstration are discussed as possible contributing factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Altruistic behaviors such as prey sharing are prosocial acts that can instigate and perpetuate various forms of reciprocity. Subsequent relationship dynamics provide a foundation for the evolution of societal norms and associated encephalization in social taxa, like primates and dolphins. Some cultures within these families benefit from interactions with other mammal species but accounts of any wild animals attempting to provision humans are extremely rare. In this article, we present 34 cases of both sexes and all age classes of killer whales (Orcinus orca) offering prey and other items to people who were on boats (n = 21), in the water (n = 11), and on shore (n = 2) in four oceans. A total of 18 species were offered-six fishes, five mammals, three invertebrates, two birds, one reptile, and one seaweed. In almost every case the whales awaited a human response before subsequently reacting. The occurrence of these events suggests a limited cost to exploratory behaviors in some populations of this species. We suggest these apparently nonrandom cases may be representative of interspecific generalized altruism. This behavior may represent some of the first accounts of any wild predator intentionally using prey and other items to directly explore human behavior and thus may highlight the evolutionary convergence of intellect between highest order primates and dolphins. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Central to many contemporary theories of language development is the idea that humans possess species-specific cognitive adaptations for understanding directional social cues, whereas contrasting theoretical positions emphasize the influence of domain-general learning mechanisms on this comprehension. We sought to test whether presumptive domain-general learning was sufficient to instill the comprehension of pointing and other cues by asking just how much training is required to train 44 mature, captive chimpanzees to follow deictic cues, using both a complex set of social cues (pointing, head/body orientation, and verbal cue) and a nonsocial cue (an object adjacency). We found that successful performance on an object choice task-a commonly used measure of receptive joint attention capacity-required relatively little explicit training. Thus, if chimpanzees can acquire this understanding with relatively little experience, humans may also acquire receptive joint attention from their learning experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).