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Full-Text Articles in Comparative Psychology
The Conundrum Of Causal Reasoning In Elephants, Beri Brown
The Conundrum Of Causal Reasoning In Elephants, Beri Brown
Master's Theses
Causal reasoning is marked by the ability to mentally reconstruct the missing part of a sequence in order to reproduce an outcome. While research on causal reasoning has been done with children, the results of the studies have been inconsistent. A standardized paradigm for comparative causal reasoning studies does not exist. Nissani (2006) investigated causal reasoning in a tool-use task with elephants and concluded that elephants were not capable of causal reasoning. The current study, a modified replication, yielded results that were not congruent with Nissani’s (2006) manuscript. Additionally, it was very unlikely that the Nissani (2006) study truly looked …
Sparking A Dolphin's Curiosity: Individual Differences In Dolphins' Reactions To Surprising And Expectation-Violating Events, Malin Katarina Lilley
Sparking A Dolphin's Curiosity: Individual Differences In Dolphins' Reactions To Surprising And Expectation-Violating Events, Malin Katarina Lilley
Master's Theses
Non-scientific literature consistently describes dolphins as “curious animals,” but there has been little systematic research on curiosity in dolphins. Curiosity in humans and certain non-human animal species, including birds and non-human primates, has been studied by examining individual differences in exploration and reactions to novel stimuli. Additionally, research has explored how human infants and non-human animals react when an event violates their expectations. The present study explored dolphins’ reactions to spontaneously surprising and expectation-violating stimuli. The reactions of dolphins, 15 bottlenose (Tursiops truncatus) and 6 rough-toothed (Steno bredanensis), at Gulf World Marine Park were analyzed in …