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Comparative Psychology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Comparative Psychology

Understanding Across The Senses: Cross-Modal Studies Of Cognition In Cetaceans, Jason N. Bruck, Adam A. Pack Aug 2022

Understanding Across The Senses: Cross-Modal Studies Of Cognition In Cetaceans, Jason N. Bruck, Adam A. Pack

Faculty Publications

Cross-modal approaches to the study of sensory perception, social recognition, cognition, and mental representation have proved fruitful in humans as well as in a variety of other species including toothed whales in revealing equivalencies that suggest that different sensory stimuli associated with objects or individuals may effectively evoke mental representations that are, respectively, object based or individual based. Building on established findings of structural equivalence in the form of spontaneous recognition of complex shapes across the modalities of echolocation and vision and behavior favoring identity echoic–visual cross-modal relationships over associative echoic–visual cross-modal relationships, examinations of transitive inference equivalencies from initially …


Gaze In Cats And Dogs, Michael Bogese Jul 2022

Gaze In Cats And Dogs, Michael Bogese

Theses and Dissertations

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) developed many behaviors across domestication, one example being gaze behavior. Gaze is the crux of other behaviors that make dogs unique in human-animal dyads, including lookbacks, gaze-following, and participation in an oxytocin feedback loop. Gaze behavior may have been motivated and sustained by evergreen cooperative relationships between dogs and humans (e.g., hunting, service roles). One way to confirm this relationship is to compare dogs to a domesticated species that lacks a protracted history of companionship: the domestic cat (Felis catus). In this study, we compare the gaze duration to owners of …


Evaluation Of Hippocampal Allostatic Load-Associated Factors In Animal Models Of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Relevance To Human Ptsd, Dennis Parker Kelley Mar 2022

Evaluation Of Hippocampal Allostatic Load-Associated Factors In Animal Models Of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Relevance To Human Ptsd, Dennis Parker Kelley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with elevated allostatic load, nearly double the risk for metabolic syndrome, reduced hippocampal volume, and contextual memory processing deficits. Emerging evidence suggests that these stress effects may predispose individuals to the development of PTSD, and there is a known relationship between chronic stress and metabolic dysfunction. In this work, we utilized two rat models of PTSD to explore these connections. We used an acute predator odor stressor to investigate the relationship between PTSD-like behaviors and mitochondrial dysfunction in the hippocampus of rats, and we observed that conditioned place avoidance was associated with reduced mitochondrial …


Sentience In Decapods: Difficulties To Surmount, Michael L. Woodruff Jan 2022

Sentience In Decapods: Difficulties To Surmount, Michael L. Woodruff

Animal Sentience

In the target article Crump et al. present 8 criteria to assess whether decapods experience pain. Four of these -- sensory integration, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, and associative learning -- could be used to assess sentience in general. In this commentary I discuss difficulties with using these criteria to provide evidence of sentience in decapods, particularly if this evidence is to change public opinion and policies. These difficulties are lack of evidence, the potential to eventually explain the neurobiological basis of the behaviors chosen as criteria, thereby eliminating any explanatory work for sentience, and the reluctance to bring animals that …


Motivated Science: What Humans Gain From Denying Animal Sentience, Uri Lifshin Jan 2022

Motivated Science: What Humans Gain From Denying Animal Sentience, Uri Lifshin

Animal Sentience

Resistance to the idea that non-human animals are sentient resembles erstwhile resistance to the theory that the earth is not the centre of the universe, or that humans evolved from “apes”. All these notions are psychologically threatening. They can remind people of their own creatureliness and mortality and might make them feel guilty or uncertain about their way of life. An honest debate over animal sentience, welfare and rights should consider the human motivation to deprive animals of these things in the first place. I briefly review empirical evidence on the psychological function of denying animal minds.