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Behavior and Ethology Commons

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Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Series

2004

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Behavior and Ethology

Pinyon Jays Use Transitive Inference To Predict Social Dominance, Guillermo Paz-Y-Miño C, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda Aug 2004

Pinyon Jays Use Transitive Inference To Predict Social Dominance, Guillermo Paz-Y-Miño C, Alan B. Bond, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Living in large, stable social groups is often considered to favor the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities, such as recognizing group members, tracking their social status and inferring relationships among them. An individual’s place in the social order can be learned through direct interactions with others, but conflicts can be time-consuming and even injurious. Because the number of possible pairwise interactions increases rapidly with group size, members of large social groups will benefit if they can make judgments about relationships on the basis of indirect evidence. Transitive reasoning should therefore be particularly important for social individuals, allowing assessment of relationships …


Sociality And The Evolution Of Intelligence, Alan Kamil Jan 2004

Sociality And The Evolution Of Intelligence, Alan Kamil

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Two recently published studies provide important new data relevant to the evolution of human intelligence. Both studies of social behavior in baboons, Bergman et al. demonstrated that baboons use two criteria simultaneously to classify other troop members, and Silk et al. showed that highly social female baboons have higher reproductive success than less social females. Taken together, these studies provide strong evidence for the importance of social context in cognitive evolution.


The Geometry Of Foraging Patterns: Components Of Thoroughness In Random Searching, Alan B. Bond Jan 2004

The Geometry Of Foraging Patterns: Components Of Thoroughness In Random Searching, Alan B. Bond

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

A Monte Carlo simulation of the movements of a randomly-searching predator was used to develop a novel geometrical measure, the "thoroughness" of the search, and to investigate the effects of meander, turn asymmetry, and path length. Thoroughness varied directly with the meander and the square of the asymmetry measure and remained relatively invariant with path length. The regularity of its relationship to the generating parameters of the search and the ease with which it may be estimated from field data recommend thoroughness for use in characterizing empirical search patterns and in testing for the occurrence of systematic searching.


Clark’S Nutcrackers (Nucifraga Columbiana) And The Effects Of Goal-Landmark Distance On Overshadowing, Aleida J. Goodyear, Alan Kamil Jan 2004

Clark’S Nutcrackers (Nucifraga Columbiana) And The Effects Of Goal-Landmark Distance On Overshadowing, Aleida J. Goodyear, Alan Kamil

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Three groups of Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) were trained to find a goal location defined by an array of 4 landmarks that varied in goal–landmark distance. The arrays for each group differed in the distance of the closest landmark and contained goal–landmark distances that were common across groups, allowing for the examination of the effects of both relative and absolute goal–landmark distance on encoding of a landmark array. All 3 groups readily learned the task and were subsequently tested in probe tests with only single landmarks from the array available. Search error in tests with single landmarks was …


Social Play In Kaka (Nestor Meridionalis) With Comparisons To Kea (Nestor Notabilis), Judy Diamond, Alan B. Bond Jan 2004

Social Play In Kaka (Nestor Meridionalis) With Comparisons To Kea (Nestor Notabilis), Judy Diamond, Alan B. Bond

Papers in Behavior in Biological Sciences

Social play in the kaka (Nestor meridionalis), a New Zealand parrot, is described and contrasted with that of its closest relative, the kea (Nestor notabilis), in one of the first comparative studies of social play in closely related birds. Most play action patterns were clearly homologous in these two species, though some contrasts in the form of specific play behaviors, such as kicking or biting, could be attributed to morphological differences. Social play in kakas is briefer, more predictable, and less sequentially diverse than that shown by keas. Kaka play also appears to be restricted to …