Mother-young recognition in an ungulate hider species: A unidirectional process

This version is the final, definitive version of this article. Mother‐Young Recognition in an Ungulate Hider Species: A Unidirectional Process. Marco V. G. Torriani, Elisabetta Vannoni, and Alan G. McElligott The American Naturalist , Vol. 168, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 412-420 Published by: The University of Chicago Press for The American Society of Naturalists Article DOI: 10.1086/50697

Goats excel at learning and remembering a highly novel cognitive task

PMCID: PMC398717

Correction: assortative mating in fallow deer reduces the strength of sexual selection.

PMCID: PMC3182158 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This article corrects this one: PLoS One. 2011; 6(4): e18533. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018533[This corrects the article on p. e18533 in vol. 6.]

Sex-biased sound symbolism in english-language first names.

Published onlineJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tSexual selection has resulted in sex-based size dimorphism in many mammals, including humans. In Western societies, average to taller stature men and comparatively shorter, slimmer women have higher reproductive success and are typically considered more attractive. This size dimorphism also extends to vocalisations in many species, again including humans, with larger individuals exhibiting lower formant frequencies than smaller individuals. Further, across many languages there are associations between phonemes and the expression of size (e.g. large /a, o/, small /i, e/), consistent with the frequency-size relationship in vocalisations. We suggest that naming preferences are a product of this frequency-size relationship, driving male names to sound larger and female names smaller, through sound symbolism. In a 10-year dataset of the most popular British, Australian and American names we show that male names are significantly more likely to contain larger sounding phonemes (e.g. "Thomas"), while female names are significantly more likely to contain smaller phonemes (e.g. "Emily"). The desire of parents to have comparatively larger, more masculine sons, and smaller, more feminine daughters, and the increased social success that accompanies more sex-stereotyped names, is likely to be driving English-language first names to exploit sound symbolism of size in line with sexual body size dimorphism.BJP is supported by a grant from The Fyssen Foundation

The use of judgement bias to assess welfare in farm livestock

The development of accurate measures of animal emotions is important for improving and promoting animal welfare. Cognitive bias indicates the effect of emotional states on cognitive processes, such as memory, attention, and judgement. Cognitive bias tests complement existing behavioural and physiological measures for assessing the valence of animal emotions indirectly. The judgement bias test has been used to assess emotional states in non-human animals; mainly in laboratory settings. The aim of this review is to summarise the findings on the use of the judgement bias test approach in assessing emotions in non-human animals, focusing in particular on farm livestock. The evidence suggests that it is possible to manipulate affective states and induce judgement bias effects in farm livestock. In addition, the results support the effectiveness of manipulating environmental variables for inducing negative or positive affective states. However, the evidence from farm livestock does not consistently confirm the directionality of the hypotheses. The use of specific strategies to induce positive or negative judgement bias, such as the manipulation of housing conditions, could account for the inconsistency of findings. The study of cognitive processes related to emotional states in livestock has great potential to advance and improve our understanding of animal welfare

Autonomic nervous system reactivity in a free-ranging mammal: effects of dominance rank and personality

Swiss Federal Veterinary Office grant (Project No. 2.11.03) to A.G.M. and E.F.B., and a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship to E.F.B (Project No. PA00P3_131485)

Emotions in goats: mapping physiological, behavioural and vocal profiles

acoustic communication; arousal; Capra hircus; positive emotions; ungulates; valence; vocal analysisSwiss Federal Veterinary Office grant (Project No. 2.11.03) to A.G.M. and E.F.B. and a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship (Grants No. PA00P3_131485 and PZ00P3_148200) to E.F.B

Low Frequency Groans Indicate Larger and More Dominant Fallow Deer (Dama dama) Males

Background: Models of honest advertisement predict that sexually selected calls should signal male quality. In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success. Previous research has emphasised the importance of vocal tract resonances or formant frequencies of calls as cues to body size in mammals. However, the role of the acoustic features of vocalisations as cues to other quality-related phenotypic characteristics of callers has rarely been investigated. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examined whether the acoustic structure of fallow deer groans provides reliable information on the quality of the caller, by exploring the relationships between male quality (body size, dominance rank, and mating success) and the frequency components of calls (fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, and formant dispersion). We found that body size was not related to the fundamental frequency of groans, whereas larger males produced groans with lower formant frequencies and lower formant dispersion. Groans of high-ranking males were characterised by lower minimum fundamental frequencies and to a lesser extent, by lower formant dispersions. Dominance rank was the factor most strongly related to mating success, with higher-ranking males having higher mating success. The minimum fundamental frequency and the minimum formant dispersion were indirectly related to male mating success (through dominance rank). Conclusion/Significance: Our study is the first to show that sexually selected vocalisations can signal social dominance in mammals other than primates, and reveals that independent acoustic components encode accurate information on different phenotypic aspects of male quality