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Life Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

1989

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Sentience Collection

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Specificity Of The Cardiac Response To Conspecific Vocalizations In Chimpanzees, Gary G. Berntson, Sarah T. Boysen Apr 1989

Specificity Of The Cardiac Response To Conspecific Vocalizations In Chimpanzees, Gary G. Berntson, Sarah T. Boysen

Sentience Collection

Heart rate measures were used to examine the functional response of young chimpanzees and orangutans to acoustic stimuli, including white noise and chimpanzee vocalizations (threat, stress, and alarm). The initial response of the animals to all stimuli was characterized by a prominent cardiac deceleration and an increase in heart period variability. The deceleratory responses persisted with repeated presentations of the noise, stress, and alarm stimuli. In contrast, the response of chimpanzees to the conspecific threat stimulus reverted over trials to a notable cardiac acceleration. This acceleratory response was not attributable to potential patterns of evoked somatic responses. The features of …


Numerical Competence In A Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes), Sarah T. Boysen, Gary G. Berntson Mar 1989

Numerical Competence In A Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes), Sarah T. Boysen, Gary G. Berntson

Sentience Collection

A chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), trained to count foods and objects by using Arabic numbers, demonstrated the ability to sum arrays of 0-4 food items placed in 2 of 3 possible sites. To address representational use of numbers, we next baited sites with Arabic numbers as stimuli. In both cases performance was significantly above chance from the first sessions, which suggests that without explicit training in combining arrays, the animal was able to select the correct arithmetic sum for arrays of foods or Arabic numbers under novel test conditions. These findings demonstrate that counting strategies and the representational use of numbers …


Conspecific Recognition In The Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes): Cardiac Responses To Significant Others, Sarah T. Boysen, Gary G. Berntson Jan 1989

Conspecific Recognition In The Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes): Cardiac Responses To Significant Others, Sarah T. Boysen, Gary G. Berntson

Sentience Collection

The ability of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) to recognize photographs of conspecifics was evaluated with heart-rate measures. Heart rate was recorded before, during, and after viewing photographs of an aggressive chimpanzee, a friendly companion animal, and an unfamiliar chimpanzee. The subject displayed a differential pattern of heart-rate response to the stimulus animals, without prior experience with the photographs. Responses to the aggressive animal were acceleratory, which suggests a defensive response. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia suggested that this response was associated with sympathetic activation. In contrast, responses to the familiar animal were minimal, whereas cardiac deceleration was observed in response to the …