Skip to content

Feb 20

The-Brain

Memorize This!

This fascinating video of Ayumu the chimp excelling at memory tasks has been going around the net.  The results of the study in the video were published by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzaw (Current Biology 17:1004-1005).  Ayumu performed better at this memory task than humans, and younger chimps performed better than older ones.  They concluded that this ability was due to having better eidectic memory, which is ‘the memory capability to retain an accurate, detailed image of a complex scene or pattern’.  Pretty amazing to me!  You can read more about eidectic memory here.

Jan 13

CleverHans

The Clever Hans Effect

In Berlin in a courtyard surrounded by high apartment buildings in the summer of 1904, there is a man and his horse.  The man is Herr von Osten who taught mathematics to grade school children.   His horse is Hans and the two are obviously very close and von Osten is very gentle with his horse.  Herr von Osten asks Hans questions, usually mathematical ones, and the horse answers by tapping out his right foot on the ground.  A shake of the head is zero.  When the answer is large, Hans taps quickly, when the answer is small he taps slowly, as though he knew the answer in advance. Read more

Dec 22

Screen Shot 2011-12-21 at 11.07.38 PM

Happy Holidays!

A brief lesson in applied animal behavior:

How to wrap a cat for Christmas

Dec 8

PB_Classroom2

What to study??

Soon after trying to uncover the magic formula that colleges use to make admission decisions, students are faced with another vexing question: What subjects and what majors should they choose to ensure their long-term success?

Read the full article here

Nov 29

horsefly

The world is as you see it…

When considering animal behavior, it’s important to think about and understand how animals perceive their environment.  Most people observe behavior and immediately think they understand what the animals are doing. This comes from the constant necessity of having to interpret human behavior.  Most people think they know what an animal is thinking and what it is responding to.  But animals live in remarkably different sensory and experiential worlds from humans, i.e. they have a different Umwelt. Read more

Nov 21

Townes-Van-Zandt-Aint-Leavin-Your-520529

Laughing Eyes

In his song Snowin’ on Raton, Townes Van Zandt sings  ”shall I cast my dreams upon your love babe / and lie beneath the laughter of your eyes.”  Part of what makes Townes an amazing musician is that his lyrics are surprising – the words aren’t what you’re expecting.  ”The laughter of your eyes” is a good example of this: we associate laughter with the mouth, or the voice, or even the diaphragm, rather than the eyes.  However, Townes is right on here.  I doubt that he read Paul Ekman’s 1978 manual on the Facial Action Coding System, but these lyrics highlight an interesting human behavior Read more

Nov 17

alstons-mouse-habitat

Singing Mice

When you think of animals that sing, birds will certainly come to mind. Whales might, too. But mice? Or fish?  It turns out mice and fish do sing, although “vocalizations” might be a more technically correct way of describing the sounds they make.  Bret Pasch, a graduate student at the University of Florida, says there are plenty of mouse species that sing. “The more we search, the more we find that rodents and other small mammals produce vocalizations,” he says.

Read the full NPR article and see videos here

Nov 14

fem boxing

Girl Fight

This month’s issue of Behavioral Ecology has a special section on intrasexual selection in females.  Female-female competition is indeed a hot topic, and a fascinating one!  But we might ask why it took so long, given that we’ve been studying male-male competition for so long.  Is it scientifically shocking that females compete for the best mates too, or might this be an example of culture bias in how we study animal behavior?

Nov 9

IMG_1128

Assuming Motivation

“Look at these cute dogs cuddling together.  They must really love each other!”

We often make assumptions about behavior when we shouldn’t.  Humans love to give other animals human qualities (i.e., anthropomorphism).  This is fine when we’re just being silly, but we also have a tendency to do this without realizing what we are doing. Read more

Nov 8

herd

Process or Mechanism?

One often hears the terms “mechanism” and “process” used interchangeably.  But really, what do they mean, what’s the difference, and does it really matter?  Giving these terms strict definitions is key to nailing down the conceptual framework of your research. Read more

← Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 352 other followers