What is it like to be a jealous dog?

Jealousy is a good candidate for comparative studies due to its clear adaptive value in protecting social bonds and affective relationships. Dogs are suitable subjects for investigating the evolution of jealousy, thanks to their rather sophisticated socio-cognitive abilities — which in some cases parallel those reported for human infants — and thanks to their long-lasting relationship with humans. The work of Cook and colleagues (2018) addresses the issue of jealousy in dogs through the lens of neuroscience, examining the relationship between the amygdala and jealousy. Their experiment has a number of methodological flaws that prevent distinguishing jealousy from other internal states; it also lacks behavioral indicators that could help in this endeavor. Nevertheless, it is an admirable step towards a multidisciplinary approach to the investigation of non-basic emotions in nonhuman species

Do Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) Make Counterproductive Choices Because They Are Sensitive to Human Ostensive Cues?

Dogs appear to be sensitive to human ostensive communicative cues in a variety of situations, however there is still a measure of controversy as to the way in which these cues influence human-dog interactions. There is evidence for instance that dogs can be led into making evaluation errors in a quantity discrimination task, for example losing their preference for a larger food quantity if a human shows a preference for a smaller one, yet there is, so far, no explanation for this phenomenon. Using a modified version of this task, in the current study we investigated whether non-social, social or communicative cues (alone or in combination) cause dogs to go against their preference for the larger food quantity. Results show that dogs' evaluation errors are indeed caused by a social bias, but, somewhat contrary to previous studies, they highlight the potent effect of stimulus enhancement (handling the target) in influencing the dogs' response. A mild influence on the dog's behaviour was found only when different ostensive cues (and no handling of the target) were used in combination, suggesting their cumulative effect. The discussion addresses possible motives for discrepancies with previous studies suggesting that both the intentionality and the directionality of the action may be important in causing dogs' social biases

Discrimination of Musical Stimuli by Rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Rats were trained under go-no go conditions to discriminate among complex acoustic stimuli (short musical sequences). In order to investigate the role of different stimulus attributes in discriminative performance, two short musical excerpts differing in their melodic pattern, but maintaining the number, pitch, and duration of notes constant were provided in two different timbres, to obtain four different complex auditory stimuli. According to the experimental condition, the discriminative stimuli were, therefore, different in structure, in timbre or in both aspects. The animals were able to discriminate efficiently among the musical sequences only when cues furnished by timbre were available, whereas melodic differences made no difference. In the experimental setting used, the rat's discrimination of complex auditory stimuli appears, therefore, to be based neither on the melody nor on a compound of melody and timbre,but simply on the properties of the timbre of the stimuli

Book Review- Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals

Cognitive ethology: The minds of other animals, edited by Carolyn A. Ristau. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, U.S.A., 1991, XX + 332 pp. 

The Mind of Organisms: Some Issues About Animal Cognition

The study of animal behavior and intelligence has a fairly long tradition, starting with Romanes naive mentalism. With a few noble exceptions, like Tolman and Kohler, psychological research on animals has been dominated by the behaviorist paradigm, and only in the last fifteen years has there been a substantial growth of interest in the analysis of cognitive processes in animals. This renewed impetus towards a cognitive approach, as opposed to a strict behaviorist perspective, resulted from both internal problems and external influences: on the one hand, there were difficulties in explaining all instances of behavior within the traditional S-R approach; on the other, mental concepts were gaining a new scientific respectability, thanks to the development of human cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence    &nbsp