Beyond the provable?

Reading Kujala’s (2017) target article, I wondered whether we really need to approach the issue of animals’ emotions the traditional way, asking whether animals have emotions that are identical, similar or precursors to those of humans. As an ethologist, I prefer to examine psychological phenomena from an evolutionary perspective, focusing on Tinbergen’s (1963) four questions (Bateson & Laland 2013)

The effect of the owner’ s personality on the behaviour of owner-dog dyads

We describe the relationships between dog owners’ personality attributes (assessed via questionnaire), their behaviours and the dog’s behaviours observed during brief dog-owner and dog-stranger interactions (N = 78). Interactions comprised the owner commanding the dog to sit, and the stranger showing a ball to the restrained dog and then hiding it. Owners scoring higher on neuroticism and openness used more commands (gestural and verbal) when asking the dog to sit, and the dogs of owners higher on neuroticism obeyed with a longer latency and spent more time looking at the stranger. More extraverted owners praised their dog more, and it took longer for their dogs to look at the stranger but they spent more time looking at the stranger, whereas dogs of more agreeable owners spent more time looking at the ball. Based on these results we conclude that some aspects of owners’ personality appear to be tied to their dog’s attentional concerns

On the utilisation of social animals as a model for social robotics

Social robotics is becoming a driving field in building artificial agents. The possibility to construct agents that can engage in meaningful social interaction with humans presents new challenges for the engineers. In general social robotics has been inspired dominantly by human psychology and aimed for building human-like robots. Only a small subcategory of companion robots (also referred to as robotic pets) was build to mimic animals. In the opinion essay we argue that all social robots should be seen as companions and more conceptual emphasis should be put on the inter-specific interaction between humans and social robots. This view is underlined by the means of an ethological analysis, and critical evaluation of present day companion robots. We suggest that human-animal interaction provides a rich source of knowledge for designing social robots that are able to interact with humans under a wide range of conditions

Specific features of NDVI, NDWI and MNDWI as reflected in land cover categories

L

Assistance dogs provide a useful behavioural model to enrich communicative skills of assistance robots

These studies are part of a project aiming to reveal relevant aspects of human–dog interactions, which could serve as a model to design successful human-robot interactions. Presently there are no successfully commercialized assistance robots, however, assistance dogs work efficiently as partners for persons with disabilities. In Study 1, we analyzed the cooperation of 32 assistance dog–owner dyads performing a carrying task. We revealed typical behavior sequences and also differences depending on the dyads' experiences and on whether the owner was a wheelchair user. In Study 2, we investigated dogs' responses to unforeseen difficulties during a retrieving task in two contexts. Dogs displayed specific communicative and displacement behaviors, and a strong commitment to execute the insoluble task. Questionnaire data from Study 3 confirmed that these behaviors could successfully attenuate owners' disappointment. Although owners anticipated the technical competence of future assistance robots to be moderate/high, they could not imagine robots as emotional companions, which negatively affected their acceptance ratings of future robotic assistants. We propose that assistance dogs' cooperative behaviors and problem solving strategies should inspire the development of the relevant functions and social behaviors of assistance robots with limited manual and verbal skills