All posts; Tags Include "Evolutionary Psychology"
- April 14, 2010
- 05:07 AM
- 815 views
Jewel Wasps manipulate specific brain centers to turn their prey into zombies
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Jewel Wasps (Ampulex compressa) are amazing creatures and their form of parental care has received quite some attention not onkly by scientists but also from the general media, and rightfully so. This parasitoid wasp serves for its young by hunting cockroaches as food. But it doesn't serve the cockroach to the offspring in pieces. No, it first performs brain surgery on the 'roaches to render them docile and then lays an egg onto the pacified animal from which a larva will hatch which then burr........ Read more »
Gal, R., & Libersat, F. (2010) A Wasp Manipulates Neuronal Activity in the Sub-Esophageal Ganglion to Decrease the Drive for Walking in Its Cockroach Prey. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010019
- April 14, 2010
- 03:56 AM
- 1,205 views
Starting from the Beginning: Evolutionary and Developmental Origins of Human Knowledge
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
What are the cognitive and neural systems that allow us to build buildings, play checkers, do multivariate statistics, receive DVDs by mail, follow Dr. Isis's pesto recipe, or navigate the tangled LA freeways?
You may ask: what can studying children and non-human animals tell us about the complexity of the human experience? Only educated human adults engage with formal mathematics, cooking, or map reading. Right?
This is a reasonable question to ask. But when human adults show complex, possi........ Read more »
Hauser, Marc D., & Spelke, Elizabeth. (2004) Evolutionary and Developmental Foundations of Human Knowledge. The Cognitive Neurosciences III (Ed. M. Gazzaniga). info:/
- April 12, 2010
- 01:41 PM
- 1,296 views
Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man's Best Friend
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
The party isn't over yet! Here's another helping of Monday Pets. Enjoy!
Wild Dog crawled into the Cave and laid his head on the Woman's lap... And the Woman said, "His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend."
--Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling.
Archaeological evidence indicates that dogs were already a part of human society around the end of the Ice Age. Small dog skeletons have been unearthed in human communities as far back as 6- to 12-thousand years ago in Europe, the Middle Ea........ Read more »
NAGASAWA, M., MOGI, K., & KIKUSUI, T. (2009) Attachment between humans and dogs. Japanese Psychological Research, 51(3), 209-221. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5884.2009.00402.x
- April 9, 2010
- 05:34 PM
- 1,294 views
Spite is the flipside of brotherly love
The biologist WD Hamilton famously said that he would lay down his life for two brothers... or eight cousins. That's kinship altruism - the idea that it makes evolutionary sense to sacrifice yourself to benefit close relatives (who share a lot of your genes). But there's another side to kinship altruism, as described by two Oxford University biologists, Stuart West and Andy Gardner, in a recent paper in Science.They point out that spiteful behaviour - acting cruelly for no gain to yourself - act........ Read more »
West SA, & Gardner A. (2010) Altruism, spite, and greenbeards. Science (New York, N.Y.), 327(5971), 1341-4. PMID: 20223978
- April 7, 2010
- 07:00 PM
- 1,420 views
Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? (3)
by The Twenty-first floor in The Twenty-first floor
Part three of our exploration of the DSM-5 and psychiatric diagnosis - focusing on the proposed inclusion of Coercive Paraphilic Disorder (which could perhaps be considered the medicalisation of rape).... Read more »
Knight, R. (2009) Is a Diagnostic Category for Paraphilic Coercive Disorder Defensible?. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(2), 419-426. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-009-9571-x
Thornton D. (2010) Evidence regarding the need for a diagnostic category for a coercive paraphilia. Archives of sexual behavior, 39(2), 411-8. PMID: 19941047
- April 6, 2010
- 04:29 PM
- 822 views
Giant Birds And Terrified Monkeys
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
The Harpy Eagle (Harpia harpyja) is a nasty scary-looking muppethugging monster of a carnivorous bird. Female harpies weigh 14-20 pounds, and males weigh 8.5-12 pounds. They stand between 2.9 and 3.5 feet tall. The wingspan of the harpy eagle can reach 6 feet, 7 inches. The talons - sharp claws to grasp onto [...]... Read more »
Gil-da-Costa R, Palleroni A, Hauser MD, Touchton J, & Kelley JP. (2003) Rapid acquisition of an alarm response by a neotropical primate to a newly introduced avian predator. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 270(1515), 605-10. PMID: 12769460
- April 5, 2010
- 03:30 AM
- 611 views
Monday Pets: The Gambler
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
So I’m in Las Vegas, gambling capital of the world. And I was reminded of the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler. And of this video of Kenny Rogers singing The Gambler with the muppets. Because the muppets make everything better.
Figure 1: Isn’t the whole guy dying and turning into a ghost thing a little much [...]... Read more »
van den Bos R, Lasthuis W, den Heijer E, van der Harst J, & Spruijt B. (2006) Toward a rodent model of the Iowa gambling task. Behavior research methods, 38(3), 470-8. PMID: 17186757
- April 1, 2010
- 09:36 PM
- 795 views
Cold Blooded Cognition
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
She: “What are you writing about?”
Me: “Cognition in cold-blooded animals.”
She: “Hot.”
Most people who study cognition focus on mammals or birds. But I hope I’ve convinced you that other animals are important to investigate as well. One research group at the University of Vienna likes cold-blooded critters. Turtles and lizards and such. They argue:
Reptiles, birds and [...]... Read more »
Wilkinson, A., Kuenstner, K., Mueller, J., & Huber, L. (2010) Social learning in a non-social reptile (Geochelone carbonaria). Biology Letters. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0092
- March 31, 2010
- 03:30 AM
- 670 views
The Origins of Small Number Representation
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Last week I wrote about the developmental and evolutionary origins of large number representation. A series of studies in human infants, monkeys, rats, and fish demonstrated that animals and humans spontaneously represent large (>4), abstract, approximate numerosities. Animals, human infants, and human adults, show the same ratio signatures (based on Weber’s Law). [...]... Read more »
Hauser, M., Carey, S., & Hauser, L. (2000) Spontaneous number representation in semi-free-ranging rhesus monkeys. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 267(1445), 829-833. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2000.1078
Feigenson L, Carey S, & Hauser M. (2002) The representations underlying infants' choice of more: object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 13(2), 150-6. PMID: 11933999
- March 30, 2010
- 05:56 PM
- 692 views
Mickey Feels Your Pain (In His Brain)
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Figure 1: Does Mickey feel empathy?
It probably depends on how you define empathy. Empathy, by any definition, implies emotional sensitivity to the affective state of another. Sometimes the empathy response is automatic or reflexive, like when babies start to cry upon hearing another baby crying. Sometimes a strong cognitive component is required, such as for [...]... Read more »
Jeon D, Kim S, Chetana M, Jo D, Ruley HE, Lin SY, Rabah D, Kinet JP, & Shin HS. (2010) Observational fear learning involves affective pain system and Ca(v)1.2 Ca(2 ) channels in ACC. Nature neuroscience, 13(4), 482-8. PMID: 20190743
- March 30, 2010
- 12:42 PM
- 868 views
Sex Differences in Cooperative Behavior - Depends on Who's Watching
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
The willingness to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma has long been thought the same for men and women. Adding an audience to the classic prisoner's dilemma experiment, however, paints a far more nuanced picture...... Read more »
Gary Charland and Aldo Rustichini. (2009) Gender differences in cooperation with group membership. N/A. info:/
- March 29, 2010
- 03:30 AM
- 731 views
Monday Pets: Dumb Guinea Pigs?
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Domestic animals and their wild counterparts can be different in big ways; there can be differences in morphology (physical characteristics), physiology, and behavior. These changes may depend on spontaneous adaptations to captivity or to artificial selection pressures arising from the motivation for domesticating the animal in the first place. For example, some of the morphological [...]... Read more »
Lewejohann L, Pickel T, Sachser N, & Kaiser S. (2010) Wild genius - domestic fool? Spatial learning abilities of wild and domestic guinea pigs. Frontiers in zoology, 7(1), 9. PMID: 20334697
- March 28, 2010
- 10:49 AM
- 746 views
universal human mate preference: four dimensions or eight factors?
by sandygautam in The Mouse Trap
Image via Wikipedia
In my last post I had mentioned how Seligman and Peterson have tried to correlate their structure of human virtues/character strengths with work of other researchers like the universal dimensions of human mate preferences discovered by Buss et al. Today I wish to discuss in detail the universal dimensions of human mate preferences More >Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Related posts:Alien Vs Predator : would eugenics and mate selction divide us in two? An inter........ Read more »
SHACKELFORD, T., SCHMITT, D., & BUSS, D. (2005) Universal dimensions of human mate preferences. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(2), 447-458. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.023
Haslam, N., Bain, P., & Neal, D. (2004) The Implicit Structure of Positive Characteristics. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(4), 529-541. DOI: 10.1177/0146167203261893
- March 26, 2010
- 03:11 AM
- 675 views
Remembering Arbitrary Rules After Ten Years
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Meet Rio.
Figure 1: Rio.
Rio is a California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus). She was born in captivity at Marine World in Northern California, and due to insufficient maternal care from her biological mother, she was transferred to the Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz when she was just a few days old. There, she was [...]... Read more »
Reichmuth Kastak C, & Schusterman RJ. (2002) Long-term memory for concepts in a California sea lion ( Zalophus californianus). Animal cognition, 5(4), 225-32. PMID: 12461600
- March 25, 2010
- 11:36 AM
- 1,465 views
Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees
by Eric Michael Johnson in The Primate Diaries
Culture defines who we are but few can explain where it comes from or why we adopt one tradition over another. In the classic musical The Fiddler on the Roof the main character, Tevye, muses on this basic fact of human existence:
Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything... how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl... This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradit........ Read more »
Lind, J., & Lindenfors, P. (2010) The Number of Cultural Traits Is Correlated with Female Group Size but Not with Male Group Size in Chimpanzee Communities. PLoS ONE, 5(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009241
- March 24, 2010
- 03:09 AM
- 716 views
What Are the Origins of Number Representation?
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
If Mondays are for single studies of cognition in various animals that we know of as pets, then Wednesdays are for longer syntheses of research in one area of knowledge, or in one animal.
Figure 1: Number representation. From whence did it come?
Today is about number. We’re going to focus on one aspect of number cognition, [...]... Read more »
Barth H, Kanwisher N, & Spelke E. (2003) The construction of large number representations in adults. Cognition, 86(3), 201-21. PMID: 12485738
Lipton JS, & Spelke ES. (2003) Origins of number sense. Large-number discrimination in human infants. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 14(5), 396-401. PMID: 12930467
Mechner F. (1958) Probability Relations within Response Sequences under Ratio Reinforcement. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1(2), 109-21. PMID: 16811206
Hauser, M., Tsao, F., Garcia, P., & Spelke, E. (2003) Evolutionary foundations of number: spontaneous representation of numerical magnitudes by cotton-top tamarins. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 270(1523), 1441-1446. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2414
Agrillo, C., Dadda, M., & Bisazza, A. (2006) Quantity discrimination in female mosquitofish. Animal Cognition, 10(1), 63-70. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-006-0036-5
- March 23, 2010
- 06:00 PM
- 960 views
Hands Off My Bone!
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Figure 1: Zooky stole his bone.
I know that I wrote about dogs yesterday. I don’t usually like to focus too much on any one particular animal two days in a row. But. This paper was too cool to put off.
Different dog growls mean different things, right? Probably. But can you tell the difference?
Here’s a dog [...]... Read more »
Farago, T., Pongracz, P., Range, F., Viranyi, Z., & Miklosi, A. (2010) ‘The bone is mine’: affective and referential aspects of dog growls. Animal Behaviour, 917-925. info:/10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.01.005
- March 22, 2010
- 10:30 AM
- 1,197 views
Monday Pets: Is My Dog Playing or Fighting With That Other Dog?
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Happy Monday. Mondays are usually pretty rough, but now they’re about to become a little bit better for you, dear reader. And that is because I’m now several months into this blogging thing, and since I seem to enjoy it, and some of you seem to enjoy it, I’m going to make an attempt at [...]... Read more »
Bekoff, M. (1995) Play Signals as Punctuation: the Structure of Social Play in Canids. Behaviour, 132(5), 419-429. DOI: 10.1163/156853995X00649
- March 18, 2010
- 01:43 PM
- 533 views
Birth Control: Desire on Schedule
by agoldstein in WiSci
Oral contraceptives can actually change a woman's mate preference...with detrimental consequences.... Read more »
Wedekind C, Seebeck T, Bettens F, & Paepke AJ. (1995) MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 260(1359), 245-9. PMID: 7630893
Roberts, S., Gosling, L., Carter, V., & Petrie, M. (2008) MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275(1652), 2715-2722. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0825
Garver-Apgar, C., Gangestad, S., Thornhill, R., Miller, R., & Olp, J. (2006) Major Histocompatibility Complex Alleles, Sexual Responsivity, and Unfaithfulness in Romantic Couples. Psychological Science, 17(10), 830-835. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01789.x
Alvergne, A., & Lummaa, V. (2010) Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Trends in Ecology , 25(3), 171-179. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.08.003
- March 15, 2010
- 08:37 PM
- 705 views
Antennectomizing Ants For Science!
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Where last we left our heroes of the Tunisian salt pans, we found that desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) represent direction by using the sun as a compass in combination with a mental clock to correct for the changing position of the sun. Ants represent distance by counting its steps in 3D space, in [...]... Read more »
Steck, K., Hansson, B., & Knaden, M. (2009) Smells like home: Desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use olfactory landmarks to pinpoint the nest. Frontiers in Zoology, 6(1), 5. DOI: 10.1186/1742-9994-6-5
Steck, K., Knaden, M., & Hansson, B. (2010) Do desert ants smell the scenery in stereo?. Animal Behaviour. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.01.011
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