In what sense are dogs special? Canine cognition in comparative context

The great increase in the study of dog cognition in the current century has yielded insights into canine cognition in a variety of domains. In this review, we seek to place our enhanced understanding of canine cognition into context. We argue that in order to assess dog cognition, we need to regard dogs from three different perspectives: phylogenetically, as carnivoran and specifically a canid; ecologically, as social, cursorial hunters; and anthropogenically, as a domestic animal. A principled understanding of canine cognition should therefore involve comparing dogs’ cognition with that of other carnivorans, other social hunters, and other domestic animals. This paper contrasts dog cognition with what is known about cognition in species that fit into these three categories, with a particular emphasis on wolves, cats, spotted hyenas, chimpanzees, dolphins, horses, and pigeons. We cover sensory cognition, physical cognition, spatial cognition, social cognition, and self-awareness. Although the comparisons are incomplete, because of the limited range of studies of some of the other relevant species, we conclude that dog cognition is influenced by the membership of all three of these groups, and taking all three groups into account, dog cognition does not look exceptional.     

流浪狗之歌

在我店里寄养着一只流浪狗．它不是我的狗．我也不是狗的主人。他是一只狮子狗．浑身白毛,相信他在被主人抛弃前,一定是一只很帅气的公狗。现在,他整天一副病态,懒洋洋的样子,眼中充满忧伤．但从不媚态和可怜。浑身的白毛．皱巴巴的,面前的毛都耷拉下来．盖住了眼睛和嘴巴．个别地方还有脏污。     

Incidental spatial memory in the domestic dog (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis familiaris</Emphasis>)

We built upon previous work by Fujita et al. (2012, Animal Cognition, 15(6), 1055–1063) to create an experiment that investigated the presence of incidental memory for the spatial location of uneaten food in the domestic dog. Here, we dissociated potentially incidental spatial memory from the incidental memory for the characteristics of objects, in this case, food bowls. Eighteen household domestic dogs of various breeds and age were presented with four bowls. Each bowl contained either a novel object, treats the dog could consume, treats it could not consume, or it was left empty. Following a delay, the dogs returned to the laboratory and were presented with empty bowls in the same spatial orientation as the initial exposure and could move freely between bowls. This experiment required no previous training outside of basic obedience and so avoids the possibility that performance on the test was a conditioned response. We hypothesized that domestic dogs would be able to remember the location of uneaten food when presented with an unexpected memory test. We found that dogs in this study showed no evidence that they encoded spatial location in the absence of other cues that could be used to distinguish food bowls at specific locations. This suggests that dogs in previous experiments were more dependent on incidentally encoding the “what” and “in what” of this task than the “where,” in the absence of features making each location distinct.     

河北省大学生弓形虫感染情况调查

目的:为了解河北省大学生弓形虫感染情况。方法:我们应用间接血凝试验(IHA)对河北北方学院1280名新生进行了弓形虫感染情况调查。结果:职业家庭同学感染率高于非职业家庭同学(P<0.05);男、女同学间感染率无显著性差异;张家口、承德、保定地区同学感染率较高;养猫狗家庭同学感染率高于无猫狗家庭同学,农村养猫狗同学感染率高于城市养猫狗同学。结论:河北省不同地区同学均有弓型虫感染,提示我们应加强饮食及个人卫生,同时应提醒广大医务人员加强对此病的认识。     

犬复孔绦虫的研究进展

犬复孔绦虫病是由犬复孔绦虫引起的一种人兽共患病,是犬、猫常见的寄生虫,偶可感染人体。但由于儿童喜欢抚玩犬猫,因此有更多机会感染本病。文章对犬复孔绦虫的病原形态、生活史、致病作用、流行病学、临床症状、诊断和防治作一综述。     

Tonic immobility in Japanese quail can reduce the probability of sustained attack by cats

In a two-choice experiment, cats (Felis domesticus) chose an active quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica) more often than a quail in tonic immobility (TI). In a second experiment, cats were individually presented with two active quail in an open field. Holding and biting by the cat, particularly about the neck, was necessary for inducing TI in a bird. Overall, the total time spent by a cat in stalking, attacking, and handling a bird was inversely related to the total time spent in TI by the bird. These results support the hypothesis that TI is a terminal defense mechanism elicited by predator contact. TI apparently eliminates the movement stimuli that sustain further attack.     

宠物情缘

“故事征集令”活动开始后, 老编的信箱里一下子收到n 多原创作品, 原来咱们身边都是卧虎藏龙呀! 本期经精选所刊登的两篇佳作, 欢迎大家点评并投票选出您最喜欢的原创故事哦! 如果你愿意刊登与故事相关的图片或照片, 请随同文章一起发给我们。     

Timmy’s in the well: Empathy and prosocial helping in dogs

Dogs are thought to evaluate humans’ emotional states, and attend more to crying people than to humming people. However, it is unclear whether dogs would go beyond focusing attention on humans in need by providing more substantive help to them. This study used a trapped-other paradigm, modified from use in research on rats, to study prosocial helping in dogs. A human trapped behind a door either cried or hummed, and the dog’s behavioral and physiological responses (i.e., door opening and heart rate variability) were recorded. Then, dogs participated in an impossible task to evaluate gaze at the owner as a measure of the strength of their relationship with their owner. Dogs in the distress condition opened at the same frequency, but significantly more quickly, than dogs in the control condition. In the distress condition, the dogs that opened showed lower levels of stress and were able to suppress their own distress response, thus enabling them to open the door more quickly. In the control condition, opening was not related to the dog’s stress level and may have instead been motivated by curiosity or a desire for social contact. Results from the impossible task suggest that openers in the distress condition may have a stronger bond with their owner than non-openers, while non-openers in the control condition showed a stronger bond than openers, which may further suggest that the trapped-other paradigm is reflective of empathy.     

Social acknowledegments for children with disabilities: effects of service dogs

While service dogs are known to perform important tasks for people using wheelchairs, such as retrieving dropped items or pulling a wheelchair, they may also serve as an antidote for social ostracism. Adults in wheelchairs have been found to receive many more social acknowledgements when a service dog is present than when not. This study examined whether disabled children in wheelchairs with service dogs receive more frequent social acknowledgment than when no dog is present. Behaviors of passersby in response to children in wheelchairs were recorded in shopping malls and on school playgrounds. In both settings, social acknowledegments (e.g., friendly glances, smiles, and conversations) were substantially more frequent when a service dog was present. Social effects of the dog were more pronounced in shopping malls, typical of unfamiliar settings where the child would be likely to experience being ignored or overlooked. Service dogs may assist in normalizing the social interactions for children with disabilities producing social isolation.     

悠闲英语（四十六）

Last time we talked about baby animals such as pups of dogs, kittens of cats, chicks of chickens, and ducklings of ducks. As I sat down to write this column, I saw some of my old squlrrelsI friends sneaking into my backyard and climbing onto the bird feeder2 to steal bird food again. They are cute but can also be a big headache, because they scare the birds a way and they eat a lot. They can finish within an hour the monthly supply that I put out for the birds. These squirrels must also be taking some of the food back to their babies, and I am wondering--what are baby squirrels called？ Ah, they are called--are you ready-- pups or kittens, just like baby dogs and cats.     

Effect of age on discrimination learning,reversal learning,and cognitive bias in family dogs

Several studies on age-related cognitive decline in dogs involve laboratory dogs and prolonged training. We developed two spatial tasks that required a single 1-h session. We tested 107 medium-large sized dogs: “young” (N=41, aged 2.5–6.5 years) and “old” (N=66, aged 8–14.5 years). Our results indicated that, in a discrimination learning task and in a reversal learning task, young dogs learned significantly faster than the old dogs, indicating that these two tasks could successfully be used to investigate differences in spatial learning between young and old dogs. We also provide two novel findings. First, in the reversal learning, the dogs trained based on the location of stimuli learned faster than the dogs trained based on stimulus characteristics. Most old dogs did not learn the task within our cut-off of 50 trials. Training based on an object’s location is therefore more appropriate for reversal learning tasks. Second, the contrast between the response to the positive and negative stimuli was narrower in old dogs, compared to young dogs, during the reversal learning task, as well as the cognitive bias test. This measure favors comparability between tasks and between studies. Following the cognitive bias test, we could not find any indication of differences in the positive and negative expectations between young and old dogs. Taken together, these findings do not support the hypothesis that old dogs have more negative expectations than young dogs and the use of the cognitive bias test in older dogs requires further investigation.     

Behavioral synchronization and affiliation: Dogs exhibit human-like skills

Behavioral synchronization is evolutionary adaptive, fostering social cohesion. In humans, affiliation between partners is associated with a high level of behavioral synchronization; people show increased affiliation towards people who synchronize with them. Surprisingly, until recently, little was known about these phenomena at an interspecific level, which is, however, essential to better understand the respective roles of evolution and ontogeny. After presenting why dog–human dyads are a relevant biological model to study this field of social cognition, we review the recent findings about dog–human behavioral synchronization. We summarize recently published findings on behavioral synchronization and affiliation between dogs and humans. We also review results showing that genetic selection modulates behavioral synchronization propensity in dogs, emphasizing the role of genetic selection on dog’s social behaviors towards humans. Finally, we discuss the possible evolutionary influences and proximate mechanisms of this phenomenon. We conclude that, as in humans, behavioral synchronization acts as a social glue between dogs and humans. After dogs’ ability to use human-directional cues or to produce referential cues towards humans, we evidenced a new human-like social process in the dog, at the interspecfic level with humans.     

强迫症患者注意偏向研究方法述评

在简要回顾有关强迫症个体注意偏向的研究的基础上,较为系统地比较、阐述了强迫症注意偏向研究中的主要研究范式（强迫症Stroop任务、点探测任务、空间线索任务）.最后,通过对前人研究的分析总结,对强迫症注意偏向未来研究的取向和趋势进行了展望.     

Can a dog be used as a motivator to develop social interaction and engagement with teachers for students with autism?

Research into children with autism indicates that therapeutic sessions with dogs might provide a way of encouraging social interaction and reducing solitary or repetitive behaviours. With recent educational ASD interventions aimed at providing ways of encouraging intrinsic motivation to socially engage, it is possible that sessions with dogs could be used in a similar way. The present study involved three students with ASD who were given five sessions with a dog and their teacher. Sessions followed a semi‐standardised approach and were recorded and coded on social behaviours, with qualitative observations made. Pre and post measures entailed ADOS‐2 assessments and teacher questionnaires. Results suggest that students' responses in sessions were highly individual; all showed an increase in meaningful social interactions with dog and teacher, reduction in solitary or repetitive behaviours within the sessions and reported generalisation effects in some areas. The study lends support to the research base on the beneficial impact of dogs for children with autism and suggests that sessions with dogs in school could act as a way to strengthen interactions and engagement with teachers.     

Hearing dogs: a longitudinal study of social and psychological effects on deaf and hard-of-hearing recipients

The organization Hearing Dogs for Deaf People provides assistance dogs that alert their deaf or hard-of-hearing recipients to key sounds, thus increasing their independence and also providing companionship. Fifty-one recipients took part in a longitudinal study to monitor the dogs' working performance over time and to examine the social and psychological effects of having a Hearing Dog. The Profile of Mood State (POMS) questionnaire and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) were used together with a Hearing Dog Questionnaire (HDQ) specifically developed for this study. There were a number of significant differences in measures of well-being between the period prior to placing the Hearing Dog and the period after placement, but there were no comparable differences during the year-long waiting period prior to placement of the dog. Recipients reported significant reductions in hearing-related problems such as response to environmental sounds; significant reductions in measures of tension, anxiety, and depression; and significant improvements in social involvement and independence. The longitudinal nature of this study supports evidence that these improvements persist for some time after the placement of a dog, with significant differences being reported, in many cases, up to 18 months after acquiring a dog.     

Newborn response to auditory stimulus discrepancy

Newborns were assessed for their recovery of head turning toward laterally presented auditory stimuli (titi) that varied from a familiar standard on 1 of 5 levels of fundamental frequency. Following habituation to repeated standard trials, newborns recovered to 14% and 21%, but not to 0%, 7%, or 28% discrepancies, indicating that recovery was a quadratic function of the degree of stimulus-schema discrepancy. Moreover, newborns reliably turned away from the standard stimulus during posthabituation no-change control trials, indicating that the neural network associated with that stimulus was not fatigued. Infants in every condition showed recovery of head turning to a novel posttest stimulus (papa). These data are interpreted with a dual processing model postulated to include both reflexive (context-independent) orientation and stimulus-schema comparison process (context-dependent) orientation.     

阅读实练

阅读短文,填入所缺单词，每格一调且不得重复     

嗨，你能听见我说话吗？

苏格兰塌耳猫的两只耳朵总是下塌着,再加上两个大大的眼睛使它的样子看上去很像是只小海豹。一些国家禁止在展览会上展出这种描,因为害怕它们下塌的耳朵会引起感染。     

对教学模式建构中存在问题的分析

在教学模式建构中有一些共同现象值得关注,包括价值取向上的偏差、研究方法上的不足等。     

The development of infant sensitivity to biomechanical motions

3 experiments were conducted to examine infant sensitivity at 20, 30, and 36 weeks of age to the 3-dimensional structure of a human form specified through biomechanical motions. All 3 experiments manipulated occlusion information in computer-generated arrays of point-lights moving as if attached to the major joints and head of a person walking. These displays are readily recognized as persons by adults when occlusion information is present, but not when it is absent or inconsistent with the implicit structure of the human body. Converging findings from Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that 36-week-old infants were sensitive to the presence of occlusion information in point-light walker displays; neither 20- nor 30-week-old infants showed any sensitivity to this information. The results of Experiment 3 revealed further that 36-week-old infants were sensitive to whether or not the pattern of occlusion was consistent with the implicit form of the human body, but only when the displays were presented in an upright orientation. These findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants, by 36 weeks of age, are extracting fundamental properties necessary for interpreting a point-light display as a person.