Goats learn socially from humans in a spatial problem-solving task

Nawroth, Christian; Baciadonna, Luigi; McElligott, Alan G.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.09.004

Cited by 62 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Owing to lateral eye position and the decussation of optic nerve fibres at the optic chiasm in ungulates (approximately 80-90 % in large domestic ungulates (Shamir & Ofri 2008)), visual cues perceived by the left eye are largely, though not exclusively, processed by the right hemisphere and vice versa. In a recent study in goats (Nawroth et al 2016b), the authors did not find agreement over repeated trials regarding the side to which goats detoured a transparent barrier. By contrast, half of the animals in this study showed individual side biases in detouring the transparent cylinder in the test.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Peer Review #1 of "Motor self-regulation in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) in a detour-reaching task (v0.1)"

2018

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Motor self-regulation is the ability to inhibit a prepotent response to a salient cue in favour of a more appropriate response. Motor self-regulation is an important component of the processes that interact to generate effective inhibitory control of behaviour, and is theorized to be a prerequisite of complex cognitive abilities in humans and other animals. In a large comparative study using the cylinder task, motor self-regulation was studied in 36 different species, mostly birds and primates. To broaden the range of species to comprehensively evaluate this phenomenon, motor self-regulation was studied in the domestic goat, which is a social ungulate species and moderate food specialist. Using the cylinder task, goats were first trained to perform a detour-reaching response to retrieve a reward from an opaque cylinder. Subsequently, an otherwise identical transparent cylinder was substituted for the opaque cylinder over 10 test trials. The goats' ability to resist approaching the visible reward directly by touching the cylinder and to retain the trained detour-reaching response was measured. The results indicated that goats showed motor self-regulation at a level comparable to or better than that of many of the bird and mammal species tested to date. However, the individual reaction patterns revealed large intra-and inter-individual variability regarding motor self-regulation. An improvement across trials was observed only in latency to make contact with the reward; no improvement in the proportion of accurate trials was observed. A short, distinct pointing gesture by the experimenter during baiting did not have any impact on the side of the cylinder to which the goats detoured. In half of goats, individual side biases were observed when detouring to the side of the cylinder, but there was no bias at the population level for either the left or right side. The results underline the need for a detailed examination of individual performance and additional measures to achieve a complete understanding of animal performance in motor self-regulation tasks.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Peer Review #1 of "Motor self-regulation in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) in a detour-reaching task (v0.1)"

2018

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“…horses in similar detour tasks [10] or goats in maze learning tasks [31]. Human demonstration, in turn, led to improved detour performance in goats and dogs [17,18], raising the question why horses did not improve with demonstration in a similar task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We presented horses with a series of ten trials with either the presence or absence of a human demonstrator. We expected horses which observed a human demonstration to perform better in the detour task than horses that did not observe a demonstration [17,18]. We further expected horses to improve over trials [17], independently of the presence or absence of a human demonstrator.…”

Section: ]mentioning

confidence: 91%

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Human Demonstration Does not Facilitate the Performance of Horses (<em>Equus </em><em>caballus</em>) in a Spatial Problem-Solving Task

Burla¹,

Siegwart²,

Nawroth³

2018

Preprint

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Horses’ ability to adapt to new environments and to acquire new information plays an important role in handling and training. Social learning in particular would be very adaptive for horses as it enables them to flexibly adapt to new environments. In the context of horse handling, social learning from humans has been rarely investigated but could help to facilitate management practices. We assessed the impact of human demonstration on spatial problem-solving abilities in horses using a detour task. In this task, a bucket with a food reward was placed behind a double-detour barrier and horses (n = 16) received a human demonstration or no demonstration. Horses were allocated to two test groups of 8 horses each, which experienced the two treatments in a counterbalanced order. We found that horses did not solve the detour task faster with human demonstration. However, both test groups improved rapidly over trials. Our results suggest that horses prefer to use individual rather than social information when being confronted with a spatial problem-solving task.

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“…Auersperg et al 2014), with now more than 60 other species studied to some extent (Cussen 2017). With the addition of fish (Petrazzini et al 2016), reptiles (Kis et al 2015;Petrazzini et al 2017), and an increasing diversity of mammals such as goats (Nawroth et al 2016), horses (Smith et al 2016) and spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta (Holekamp & Benson-Amram 2017), it is clear that impressive cognitive abilities are widespread, raising the question as to the extent to which these abilities share common, ancestral mechanisms, and whether convergence is much more widespread than is typically assumed.…”

Section: The Evolution Of Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The face of animal cognition

Healy

2019

Integrative Zoology

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As an increasing number of researchers investigate the cognitive abilities of an ever-wider range of animals, animal cognition is currently among the most exciting fields within animal behavior. Tinbergen would be proud: all four of his approaches are being pursued and we are learning much about how animals collect information and how they use that information to make decisions for their current and future states as well as what animals do not perceive or choose to ignore. Here I provide an overview of this productivity, alighting only briefly on any single example, to showcase the diversity of species, of approaches and the sheer mass of research effort currently under way. We are getting closer to understanding the minds of other animals and the evolution of cognition at an increasingly rapid rate.

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Goats learn socially from humans in a spatial problem-solving task

Cited by 62 publications

References 40 publications

Peer Review #1 of "Motor self-regulation in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) in a detour-reaching task (v0.1)"

Peer Review #1 of "Motor self-regulation in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) in a detour-reaching task (v0.1)"

Human Demonstration Does not Facilitate the Performance of Horses (<em>Equus </em><em>caballus</em>) in a Spatial Problem-Solving Task

The face of animal cognition

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