1,720,981 research outputs found
Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) recognise meaningful content in monotonous streams of read speech
No full textDomestic dogs (Canis familiaris) can recognize basic phonemic information from human speech and respond to commands. Commands are typically presented in isolation with exaggerated prosody known as dog-directed speech (DDS) register. Here, we investigate whether dogs can spontaneously identify meaningful phonemic content in a stream of putatively irrelevant speech spoken in monotonous prosody, without congruent prosodic cues. To test this ability, dogs were played recordings of their owners reading a meaningless text which included a short meaningful or meaningless phrase, either read with unchanged reading prosody or with an exaggerated DDS prosody. We measured the occurrence and duration of dogs’ gaze at their owners. We found that, while dogs were more likely to detect and respond to inclusions that contained meaningful phrases spoken with DDS prosody, they were still able to detect these meaningful inclusions spoken in a neutral reading prosody. Dogs detected and responded to meaningless control phrases in DDS as frequently as to meaningful content in neutral reading prosody, but less often than to meaningful content in DDS. This suggests that, while DDS prosody facilitates the detection of meaningful content in human speech by capturing dogs’ attention, dogs are nevertheless capable of spontaneously recognizing meaningful phonemic content within an unexaggerated stream of speech.</p
Centring individual animals to improve research and citation practices
No full textModern behavioural scientists have come to acknowledge that individual animals may respond differently to the same stimuli and that the quality of welfare and lived experience can affect behavioural responses. However, much of the foundational research in behavioural science lacked awareness of the effect of both welfare and individuality on data, bringing their results into question. This oversight is rarely addressed when citing seminal works as their findings are considered crucial to our understanding of animal behaviour. Furthermore, more recent research may reflect this lack of awareness by replication of earlier methods – exacerbating the problem. The purpose of this review is threefold. First, we critique seminal papers in animal behaviour as a model for re-examining past experiments, attending to gaps in knowledge or concern about how welfare may have affected results. Second, we propose a means to cite past and future research in a way that is transparent and conscious of the abovementioned problems. Third, we propose a method of transparent reporting for future behaviour research that (i) improves replicability, (ii) accounts for individuality of non-human participants, and (iii) considers the impact of the animals' welfare on the validity of the science. With this combined approach, we aim both to advance the conversation surrounding behaviour scholarship while also serving to drive open engagement in future science
Vocal communication between humans and animals
No full textIn this article, we review the scientific literature examining vocal communication between humans and other animals, with a focus on dog-human interactions, as these have recently received considerable attention from scientists.We discuss how vocal signals are produced in human and non-human mammals, arguing that vocal communication between different mammalian species is facilitated by commonalities in the production and perception of sound signals. Production mechanisms are described in the context of source-filter theory, and perceptual abilities in the context of motivational-structural rules.We then review the extent to which humans perceive and use the information content of animal vocal signals, finding that familiarity and phylogenetic relatedness are potential features for shared perception, but that cross-species communication appears possible even between unfamiliar and distantly related species. Domestication may have furthermore artificially selected for vocal signals that exploit human perceptual biases, thereby promoting cooperation between domesticated species and humans.Finally, we discuss animals’ abilities to assess information from both the nonverbal and verbal dimensions of human speech, also reviewing recent research on pet-directed speech, a specific voice register used by human speakers when addressing their pets. We report that many animals can decode information from human vocal signals including speaker traits, emotional and motivational states, and even phonemic or linguistic content
Data from: Not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf: calls from large predators do not silence mesopredators
No full text<p>Large predators are known to shape the behavior and ecology of sympatric predators via conflict and competition, with mesopredators thought to avoid large predators, while dogs suppress predator activity and act as guardians of human property. However, interspecific communication between predators has not been well-explored and this assumption of avoidance may oversimplify the responses of the species involved. We explored the acoustic activity of three closely related sympatric canids: wolves <em>Canis lupus</em>, coyotes <em>Canis latrans</em>, and dogs <em>Canis familiaris</em>. These species have an unbalanced triangle of risk: coyotes, as mesopredators, are at risk from both apex-predator wolves and human-associated dogs, while wolves fear dogs, and dogs may fear wolves as apex predators or challenge them as intruders into human-allied spaces. We predicted that risk perception would dictate vocal response with wolves and dogs silencing coyotes as well as dogs silencing wolves. Dogs, in their protective role of guarding human property, would respond to both. Eleven passive acoustic monitoring devices were deployed across 13 nights in Central Wisconsin, and we measured the responses of each species to naturally occurring heterospecific vocalizations. Against our expectation, silencing did not occur. Instead, coyotes were not silenced by either species: when hearing wolves, coyotes responded at greater than chance rates and when hearing dogs, coyotes did not produce fewer calls than chance rates. Similarly, wolves responded at above chance rates to coyotes and at chance rates when hearing dogs. Only the dogs followed our prediction and responded at above chance rates in response to both coyotes and wolves. Thus, instead of silencing their competitors, canid vocalizations elicit responses from them suggesting the existence of a complex heterospecific communication network.</p><p>Funding provided by: Animal Behaviour Society*<br>Crossref Funder Registry ID: <br>Award Number: </p>
Data from: Not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf: calls from large predators do not silence mesopredators
No full text<p>Large predators are known to shape the behavior and ecology of sympatric predators via conflict and competition, with mesopredators thought to avoid large predators, while dogs suppress predator activity and act as guardians of human property. However, interspecific communication between predators has not been well-explored and this assumption of avoidance may oversimplify the responses of the species involved. We explored the acoustic activity of three closely related sympatric canids: wolves <em>Canis lupus</em>, coyotes <em>Canis latrans</em>, and dogs <em>Canis familiaris</em>. These species have an unbalanced triangle of risk: coyotes, as mesopredators, are at risk from both apex-predator wolves and human-associated dogs, while wolves fear dogs, and dogs may fear wolves as apex predators or challenge them as intruders into human-allied spaces. We predicted that risk perception would dictate vocal response with wolves and dogs silencing coyotes as well as dogs silencing wolves. Dogs, in their protective role of guarding human property, would respond to both. Eleven passive acoustic monitoring devices were deployed across 13 nights in Central Wisconsin, and we measured the responses of each species to naturally occurring heterospecific vocalizations. Against our expectation, silencing did not occur. Instead, coyotes were not silenced by either species: when hearing wolves, coyotes responded at greater than chance rates and when hearing dogs, coyotes did not produce fewer calls than chance rates. Similarly, wolves responded at above chance rates to coyotes and at chance rates when hearing dogs. Only the dogs followed our prediction and responded at above chance rates in response to both coyotes and wolves. Thus, instead of silencing their competitors, canid vocalizations elicit responses from them suggesting the existence of a complex heterospecific communication network.</p><p>Funding provided by: Animal Behaviour Society*<br>Crossref Funder Registry ID: <br>Award Number: </p>
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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