Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Animal Suffering Calls For More Than A Bigger Cage, Simon R. B. Leadbeater

Animal Sentience

Ng (2016) argues for incremental welfare biology partly because it would be impossible to demonstrate conclusively that animals are sentient. He argues that low cost changes in industrial practices and working collaboratively may be more effective in advancing animal welfare than more adversarial approaches. There is merit in some of Ng’s recommendations but a number of his arguments are, in my view, misdirected. The fact that nonhuman animals feel has already been adequately demonstrated. Cruelty to animals is intrinsic to some industries, so the only way to oppose it is to oppose the industry.

Application Of Visual Cues On 3d Dynamic Visualizations For Engineering Technology Students And Effects On Spatial Visualization Ability: A Quasi-Experimental Study, Petros Katsioloudis, Vukica Jovanovic, Mildred Jones

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Several theorists believe that different types of visual cues influence cognition and behavior through learned associations; however, research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a quasi-experimental study was done to determine if there are significant positive effects of visual cues (color blue) and to identify if a positive increase in spatial visualization ability for students in engineering technology courses is observed. According to the results of this study it is suggested that the use of the specific visual cue (color blue) provides no statistically significant higher scores versus the treatment that did not utilize any visual cues.

The Effects Of A Trauma-Informed Care Training Program On Mental Health Professionals Knowledge, Skills, And Attitudes With The Smi, Angelina Pelletier

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

Trauma has been found to be highly prevalent among individuals diagnosed with SMIs. Mental health professionals have been reported to misdiagnose or avoid addressing trauma in this population. There is a need to provide information about trauma and to foster awareness among mental health professionals who are treating individuals diagnosed with SMIs. With a TIC approach, operating from a recovery-oriented philosophy, there have been interventions created to address trauma and SMIs with the aim of developing awareness about trauma and the impact it may have on someone’s life. With these factors in mind, mental health professionals should be competent in …

Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner

Animal Sentience

King discusses many examples where two animals, as they bond, behave in ways we interpret as expressing love for one another. If one of the bonded animals then dies, signs of loving are replaced by signs we interpret as expressing grief by the animal who remains. I propose a pathway for emotional communication between an animal and an observer that can have a central role in these and other observations by King and in our overall ability to interpret observed behavior in relation to emotion. This pathway provides evidence of emotion in an observed animal by communicating evidence of emotion’s …

Sentience And Animal Welfare: Affirming The Science And Addressing The Skepticism, Nancy Clarke

Animal Sentience

Broom’s (2014) book is a well-researched and thoroughly written exploration and evaluation of the journey from the origins of animal welfare science to what we can say we now know and need to consider in relation to animal sentience and welfare. This book will help to counter any skepticism among academics and policy makers.

Confidence Judgments In A Simultaneous Task Using Sprague Dawley Rats (Rattus Norvegicus), Jessica K. Kumm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the present experiment, metacognitive confidence judgments were measured in the Sprague-dawley rats using a simultaneous discrimination task. Performance on two types of trials were compared: Forced and Choice. For Forced trials, subjects were required to classify a range of eight tones as either a “long” or “short” tone with the four longest frequency durations comprising the “long” tone category and the four shortest frequency tones comprising the “short” tone duration category. The Choice trials were identical to the Forced trials with the exception that a bailout response was also available, allowing the subject to advance to the next trial …

Animal Welfare And Animal Rights, M.E. Rolle

Animal Sentience

This overview of Broom’s book, Sentience and Animal Welfare (2014), considers the role the book could play in the animal rights debate. In a thoroughly researched and objectively presented text, Broom lays out information that could place doubt in the minds of decision-makers. By highlighting not just the ways animals resemble humans, but also the ways humans resemble animals, Broom shines a light on a solidly grey area in the animal rights debate.

The Relationship Between Nursing Students' Perceptions Of Staff Nurses' Attitudes Towards Them And Self-Efficacy In Sophomore- And Senior- Level Nursing Students, Sarah A. Mueller, Raechel M. Naragon, Rachael R. Smith

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Clinical teaching gives nursing students practical experience, allowing them to practice skills and to apply theories of nursing alongside a staff nurse. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between nursing students’ perceptions of staff nurses’ attitudes towards them and self-efficacy in sophomore- and senior-level nursing students. According to scientist Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, self-efficacy is defined as a person’s belief in his or her own abilities. Using non-experimental comparative design, convenience sampling, and Likert scale questionnaires, sophomore- and senior- level baccalaureate nursing students were asked to complete the survey using the Nursing Clinical Self-Efficacy …

Nonhuman Mind-Reading Ability, Marthe Kiley-Worthington

Animal Sentience

Harnad (2016) is mistaken that humans are better at mind-reading than other species. Humans have context-independent language, but nonhuman species, especially mammals, have context-dependent nonverbal skills – perceptual, communicative and social -- that can be much keener than our own.

Slam Poetry: An Online Intervention For Treating Depression, Spencer J. Ruchti, Mercedes Becker, Cara Mckee, Austin Herron, Alex Swalling

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Given that depression is the “leading cause of disability worldwide,” and that less than 50% of people suffering from depression receive treatment, this study aims to provide support for a globally accessible depression treatment (WHO, 2012). The study conducted implemented an internet-based treatment for depression in which users were provided an opportunity to watch slam poetry videos related to mental health issues and write free responses regarding the content of the videos and their subjective experience of depression. Numerous studies provide support for the effectiveness of expressive writing, online mental health interventions, and slam poetry in particular for reducing symptoms …

Chronic Pain Causal Attributions In An Interdisciplinary Primary Care Clinic: Patient-Provider And Provider-Provider Discrepancies, Bryan Jensen

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of pain causal attributions on patient pain-related functioning, treatment engagement, and clinical outcomes. Additionally, the impact of discordant pain causal attributions between patients and their providers as well as between interdisciplinary providers was examined. Patients rated their pain functioning and causal pain attributions during a regular clinic visit. Following the patient’s visit both the behavioral medicine provider and internal medicine resident provided ratings of similar pain-related functioning domains and causal attributions. Follow-up data were collected from the electronic medical record three months following that clinic visit. Overall, results revealed …

Cognitive Evidence Of Fish Sentience, Jonathan Balcombe

Animal Sentience

I present a little-known example of flexible, opportunistic behavior by a species of fish to undermine Key’s (2016) thesis that fish are unconscious and unable to feel. Lack of a cortex is flimsy grounds for denying pain to fish, for on that criterion we must also then deny it to all non-mammals, including birds, which goes against scientific consensus. Notwithstanding science’s fundamental inability to prove anything, the precautionary principal dictates that we should give the benefit of the doubt to fish, and the state of the oceans dictates that we act on it now.

Mediating Claims Through Critical Anthropomorphism, Gordon Burghardt

Animal Sentience

Key’s (2016) discussion of his claim that fish do not feel pain ignores the history of attempts to study the attribution of mental states to other species. Although willing to accept that mammals feel pain, Key claims that fish lack the mammalian neural mechanisms underlying pain and are unconscious of their experiences. Consequently, we do not need to be overly concerned about fishing practices that would otherwise be viewed as painful. Key uses a flawed anthropomorphic lens. All attributions of mental events to organisms other than oneself involve inferences derived from anthropomorphic processes through which we process physiological and behavioral …

The Effect Of Inversion And Motor Expertise On Body Compatibility, Harrison M. Goodall Iii

Pomona Senior Theses

Previous studies have established that when a subject’s attention is directed to a specific body part, the subject is able to move that body part faster than a body part their attention was not drawn to. This is known as the body compatibility effect, and it has been shown that this effect only occurs when viewing upright images of the human body. In this study, we presented control subjects and expert acrobats with inverted and upright stimuli. We hypothesized that the amount of time the acrobats spent inverted would result in the acrobats exhibiting body compatibility effects for both upright …

Reflections Of The Social Environment In Chimpanzee Memory: Applying Rational Analysis Beyond Humans, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Julian N. Marewski, Lael J. Schooler, Ian C. Gilby

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

In cognitive science, the rational analysis framework allows modelling of how physical and social environments impose information-processing demands onto cognitive systems. In humans, for example, past social contact among individuals predicts their future contact with linear and power functions. These features of the human environment constrain the optimal way to remember information and probably shape how memory records are retained and retrieved. We offer a primer on how biologists can apply rational analysis to study animal behaviour. Using chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a case study, we modelled 19 years of observational data on their social contact patterns. Much …

Cognitive Phenotypes And The Evolution Of Animal Decisions, Tamra C. Mendelson, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Mark E. Hauber, Charles H. Pence, Rafael L. Rodriguez, Rebecca J. Safran, Caitlin A. Stern, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Despite the clear fitness consequences of animal decisions, the science of animal decision making in evolutionary biology is underdeveloped compared with decision science in human psychology. Specifically, the field lacks a conceptual framework that defines and describes the relevant components of a decision, leading to imprecise language and concepts. The ‘judgment and decision-making’ (JDM) framework in human psychology is a powerful tool for framing and understanding human decisions, and we apply it here to components of animal decisions, which we refer to as ‘cognitive phenotypes’. We distinguish multiple cognitive phenotypes in the context of a JDM framework and highlight empirical …

Context-Dependent Seed Dispersal By A Scatter-Hoarding Corvid, Mario B. Pesendorfer, T. Scott Sillett, Scott A. Morrison, Alan C. Kamil

Avian Cognition Papers

1. Corvids (crows, jays, magpies and nutcrackers) are important dispersers of large-seeded plants. Studies on captive or supplemented birds suggest that they flexibly adjust their scatter-hoarding behavior to the context of social dynamics and relative seed availability. Because many corvid-dispersed trees show high annual variation in seed production, context-dependent foraging can have strong effects on natural corvid scatter-hoarding behavior.

2. We investigated how seed availability and social dynamics affected scatter-hoarding in the island scrub jays (Aphelocoma insularis). We quantified rates of scatter-hoarding behavior and territorial defense of 26 colormarked birds over a three-year period with variable acorn crops. …

Fish Lack The Brains And The Psychology For Pain, Stuart W.G. Derbyshire

Animal Sentience

Debate about the possibility of fish pain focuses largely on the fish’s lack of the cortex considered necessary for generating pain. That view is appealing because it avoids relatively abstract debate about the nature of pain experience and subjectivity. Unfortunately, however, that debate cannot be entirely avoided. Subcortical circuits in the fish might support an immediate, raw, “pain” experience. The necessity of the cortex only becomes obvious when considering pain as an explicitly felt subjective experience. Attributing pain to fish only seems absurd when pain is considered as a state of explicit knowing.

Pain And Other Feelings In Humans And Animals, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio

Animal Sentience

Evidence from neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology suggests that the experience of feelings in humans does not depend exclusively on structures of the cerebral cortex. It does not seem warranted to deny the possibility of feeling in animals on the grounds that their cerebral cortices are not comparable to those of humans.

The Mediating Role Of Cognitive Flexibility On The Relationship Between Cross-Race Interactions And Psychological Well-Being, Robert D. Cardom

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Counseling psychologists are tasked with understanding optimal psychological and cognitive functioning. Recent theoretical predictions (Crisp & Turner, 2011) and growing evidence suggest that cross-race interactions are important ways individuals might improve their cognitive and psychosocial functioning. However, the theoretical predictions from Crisp and Turner have not yet been tested in one model. Further, much of the empirical support for the theoretical predictions has been from studies using 1) undergraduate samples and 2) weak theory-measurement fit.

The present study used an online, community survey (N = 270) to test Crisp and Turner’s (2011) predictions that cognitive flexibility would mediate the …