20 research outputs found
Understanding the Interaction Between Animals and Wearables: The Wearer Experience of Cats
Animals can be negatively affected by wearable tracking devices, even those marketed as ‘animal friendly’ and increasingly used with companion animals, such as cats. To understand the wearer experience of cats fitted with popular GPS trackers, we measured the behavior of 13 feline participants while they were wearing the devices during a field study. The aim of our behavioral analysis was twofold: investigating potential signs of discomfort generated by the devices to evaluate the impact that such interventions have on cat wearers; identifying wearability flaws that might account for the observed impact and wearability requirements to improve the design of the devices. Based on our findings, we propose a set of requirements that should inform the design of trackers to afford better wearability and thus provide better wearer experience for cat wearers
Goal Slippage: A Mechanism for Spontaneous Instrumental Helping in Infancy?
In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children—in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus (Child Development Perspectives 8(2):77–81, 2014) has dubbed ‘goal-alignment’, i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent’s goal leads infants to take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the ‘goal contagion’ model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the ‘goal slippage’ model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work