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Full-Text Articles in Animal Sciences

Domestication And Cognitive Complexity, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck, Keeghan Rosso Jan 2019

Domestication And Cognitive Complexity, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck, Keeghan Rosso

Animal Sentience

Marino and Merskin (2019) list a number of tasks that sheep can perform well. As comparative psychologists, we are not surprised by these results. Indeed, many domesticated animal species show similar abilities.


Learning, Memory, Cognition, And The Question Of Sentience In Fish, Robert Gerlai Jan 2017

Learning, Memory, Cognition, And The Question Of Sentience In Fish, Robert Gerlai

Animal Sentience

Evolutionarily conserved features have been demonstrated at many levels of biological organization across a variety of species. Evolutionary conservation may apply to complex behavioral phenomena too. It is thus not inconceivable that a form of sentience does exist even in the lowest order vertebrate taxon, the teleosts. How similar it is to human sentience in its level of complexity or in its multidimensional features is a difficult question, especially from an experimental standpoint, given that even the definition of human sentience is debated. Woodruff attempts a Turing-like test of fish sentience, and lists numerous neuroanatomic, neurophysiological and behavioral similarities between …


Spatial And Temporal Response Patterns On The Eight-Arm Radial Maze, Robert H.I. Dale Jun 2014

Spatial And Temporal Response Patterns On The Eight-Arm Radial Maze, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Six maze-experienced hooded rats were timed during five trials on which they collected water from all arms of an eight-arm radial maze, then made five more choices. All subjects frequently exhibited a “task-completion pause:” The subjects rarely spent more than 1 sec in the center of the maze between choices until they had entered all eight arms, then stopped in the center of the maze. In contrast, the time spent in each arm gradually increased until all of the water had been obtained, then decreased slightly. Four subjects began every trial by choosing eight consecutive adjacent arms. The task-completion pause …


The Hippocampus As Episodic Encoder: Does It Play Tag?, Robert H.I. Dale May 2014

The Hippocampus As Episodic Encoder: Does It Play Tag?, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Rawlins’s characterization of the hippocampus as a “high-capacity, immediate-term memory store” captures the essential idea in a number of previous models. For example, Gaffan (1974), Gray (1984), Hirsh (1980), Kesner (Bierley, Kesner & Novak 1983), Olton (Olton, Becker & Handelmann 1979), Solomon (1980), and Winocur (1980) all agree that hippocampal animals show memory deficits when required to identify, for whatever reason, one specific event out of a list of recent events. Although these authors disagree on a number of details, Rawlins has identified their models common ground, the core of each model. (It is only fair to note that Gaffan …


Lobster Attack Induces Sensitization In The Sea Hare, Aplysia Californica, Amanda J. Watkins, Daniel A. Goldstein, Lucy C. Lee, Christina J. Pepino, Scott L. Tillett, Francis E. Ross, Elizabeth M. Wilder, Virginia A. Zachary, William G. Wright Jan 2010

Lobster Attack Induces Sensitization In The Sea Hare, Aplysia Californica, Amanda J. Watkins, Daniel A. Goldstein, Lucy C. Lee, Christina J. Pepino, Scott L. Tillett, Francis E. Ross, Elizabeth M. Wilder, Virginia A. Zachary, William G. Wright

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Studies of the neural mechanisms of learning, especially of sensitization, have benefitted from extensive research on the model species, Aplysia californica (hereafter Aplysia). Considering this volume of literature on mechanisms, it is surprising that our understanding of the ecological context of sensitization in Aplysia is completely lacking. Indeed, the widespread use of strong electric shock to induce sensitization (an enhancement of withdrawal reflexes following noxious stimulation) is completely unnatural and leaves unanswered the question of whether this simple form of learning has any ecological relevance. We hypothesized that sublethal attack by a co-occurring predator, the spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus, might …


Spatial And Temporal Response Patterns On The Eight-Arm Radial Maze, Robert H.I. Dale Jan 1986

Spatial And Temporal Response Patterns On The Eight-Arm Radial Maze, Robert H.I. Dale

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Six maze-experienced hooded rats were timed during five trials on which they collected water from all arms of an eight-arm radial maze, then made five more choices. All subjects frequently exhibited a “task-completion pause:” The subjects rarely spent more than 1 sec in the center of the maze between choices until they had entered all eight arms, then stopped in the center of the maze. In contrast, the time spent in each arm gradually increased until all of the water had been obtained, then decreased slightly. Four subjects began every trial by choosing eight consecutive adjacent arms. The task-completion pause …


The Hippocampus As Episodic Encoder: Does It Play Tag?, Robert H.I. Dale Sep 1985

The Hippocampus As Episodic Encoder: Does It Play Tag?, Robert H.I. Dale

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Rawlins’s characterization of the hippocampus as a “high-capacity, immediate-term memory store” captures the essential idea in a number of previous models. For example, Gaffan (1974), Gray (1984), Hirsh (1980), Kesner (Bierley, Kesner & Novak 1983), Olton (Olton, Becker & Handelmann 1979), Solomon (1980), and Winocur (1980) all agree that hippocampal animals show memory deficits when required to identify, for whatever reason, one specific event out of a list of recent events. Although these authors disagree on a number of details, Rawlins has identified their models common ground, the core of each model. (It is only fair to note that Gaffan …