Dog trainers make widespread claims that training dogs to improve self-control is essential to solving behavior problems in domesticated dogs. We investigated whether one aspect of self-control, motor inhibition, covaries in dogs with varying levels and contexts of formal training. We tested pet dogs with little formal training and dogs with high levels of training who compete in scent work, barn hunt, and agility. All dogs were tested for motor inhibition on the cylinder task, a validated self-control task. First, in familiarization trials, dogs watched a piece of food placed inside an opaque cylinder and were subsequently allowed to retrieve it. Then, in test trials, dogs watched a piece of food placed inside a transparent cylinder. This transparent variation of the task requires dogs to inhibit the response to directly approach the now-visible food and instead detour to an open side. In contrast to the belief that highly trained dogs would uniformly demonstrate better self-control, trained dogs did not perform better than untrained dogs. In fact, dogs who competed in barn hunt performed significantly worse compared to untrained pet dogs. These findings suggest that self-control may involve a complex set of mental processes that do not uniformly generalize to multiple contexts.

Comparative researchers seek to understand nonhuman minds but must also consider how our research supports animal welfare. We propose two distinct pathways to accomplish this: (a) correcting misconceptions about dog training by making our work accessible to the general public and (b) developing new research questions directly exploring the impacts of engagement in animal-assisted intervention programs on canine welfare.

Ambiguity aversion-the tendency to avoid options whose outcome probabilities are unknown-is a ubiquitous phenomenon. While in some cases ambiguity aversion is an adaptive strategy, in many situations it leads to suboptimal decisions, as illustrated by the famous Ellsberg Paradox. Behavioral interventions for reducing ambiguity aversion should therefore be of substantial practical value. Here we test a simple intervention, aimed at reducing ambiguity aversion in an experimental design, where aversion to ambiguity leads to reduced earnings. Participants made a series of choices between a reference lottery with a 50% chance of winning $5, and another lottery, which offered more money, but whose outcome probability was either lower than 50% (risky lottery) or not fully known (ambiguous lottery). Similar to previous studies, participants exhibited both risk and ambiguity aversion in their choices. They then went through one of three interventions. Two groups of participants learned about the Ellsberg Paradox and their own suboptimal choices, either by actively calculating the objective winning probability of the ambiguous lotteries, or by observing these calculations. A control group learned about base-rate neglect, which was irrelevant to the task. Following the intervention, participants again made a series of choices under risk and ambiguity. Participants who learned about the Ellsberg Paradox were more tolerant of ambiguity, yet ambiguity aversion was not completely abolished. At the same time, these participants also exhibited reduced aversion to risk, suggesting inappropriate generalization of learning to an irrelevant decision domain. Our results highlight the challenge for behavioral interventions: generating a strong, yet specific, behavioral change.

Humans evaluate other agents’ behavior on a variety of different dimensions, including morally, from a very early age. For example, human infants as young as 6-months old prefer prosocial over antisocial others and demonstrate negative evaluations of antisocial others in a variety of paradigms (Hamlin et al. in Nature 450(7169):557, 2007; Dev Sci 13(6):923–929, 2010; Proc Natl Acad Sci 108(50):19931–19936, 2011). While these tendencies are well documented in the human species, less is known about whether similar preference emerge in non-human animals. Here, we explore this question by testing prosocial preferences in one non-human species: the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris). Given the ubiquity of dog–human social interactions, it is possible that dogs display human-like social evaluation tendencies. Unfortunately, prior research examining social evaluation in dogs has produced mixed results. To assess whether differences in methodology or training differences account for these contrasting results, we tested two samples of dogs with different training histories on an identical social evaluation task. Trained agility dogs approached a prosocial actor significantly more often than an antisocial actor, while untrained pet dogs showed no preference for either actor. These differences across dogs with different training histories suggest that while dogs may demonstrate preferences for prosocial others in some contexts, their social evaluation abilities are less flexible and less robust compared to those of humans.

Harmon-Jones et al. (2017) make a thought-provoking suggestion in their commentary on Zentall (2016): Overlooked biases among researchers on animal cognition might lead them to discount the traces of higher-order cognition in animals they study. We find the suggestion both philosophically important and worth further reflection for animal scientists. Harmon-Jones et al. point to two "cognitive dissonance" biases involving the clash between the common human resistance to viewing ourselves as animals/meat-eaters and how these biases might lead to discounting possible advanced cognitive performances in the animals studied. We show how these biases might appear in cognitive research generally and argue for further study on their effects.

GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Psychol., 10 November 2015Sec. Comparative Psychology Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01729

Cooperation Decreases with Development of Number Sense Ellen E. Furlong (ellen.furlong@yale.edu) Department of Psychology, PO Box 208205 New Haven, CT 06511USA John E. Opfer (opfer.7@osu.edu) Department of Psychology, 245 Psychology Bldg Columbus, OH 43210 USA Abstract Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). Following this approach, we propose a novel and surprising influence on cooperation— how children represent numeric value. In the following sections we: (1) follow Hobbes’ lead and provide a game theoretical analysis linking incentive structure to cooperative behavior, (2) explain how developing representations of number affect representation of incentive structures, and (3) show how this analysis accurately predicts Rousseau’s claim that cooperation would decrease with age and experience. Cooperation among children can appear haphazard, a finding often attributed to deficient social skills and moral reasoning. Here we took a game theoretical approach to understand development of cooperation, using the prisoner’s dilemma to test an alternative source of age-differences in cooperative behavior—how children and adults represent the numerical magnitudes of payoffs for cooperating versus not. We found that as incentives increased solely in numerical magnitude, speed of incentive comparisons decreased and cooperation increased. Further, though children tended to be more cooperative than adults, effect of age on cooperation was moderated by speed of incentive comparison. We conclude that representations of numeric value constrain how economic rewards affect cooperation and that children’s greater cooperativeness may be attributed to a poor sense of numerical value. Game Theory Links Incentives to Cooperation Keywords: Cooperation; Numerical Cognition; Cognitive Development. Introduction Development of cooperation—how it begins, how it changes over time, and what factors promote it—has invited speculation for at least 350 years. According to Rousseau (1754/2007), cooperation is our birthright, society breeds competition; according to Hobbes (1651/2008), we are naturally competitive, society promotes cooperation. Although scientists champion neither position, nearly all look to the same factors—social constructs—to explain development of cooperation (Miles, Hare & Tomasello, 2006; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; 2007; Warneken, Chen & Tomasello, 2006). Research on the role of social constructs (i.e., theory of mind, communication, fairness norms, trust, social tolerance) on development of cooperation finds support for both views—development breeds either competition or cooperation, depending on the context (i.e., Damon, 1975; Lane & Coon, 1972; Piaget, 1932; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006; 2007; Warneken, Chen & Tomasello, 2006). One possible way to explain the role of context on development of cooperation is to consider that cooperation may result, not only from developing social skills, but also from how cooperative incentives are mentally represented (Furlong & Opfer, 2009). This role for incentive structure has been explored by game theory, which predicts circumstances under which organisms are likely to cooperate and tests these predictions using games such as Insight into why cooperation depends heavily on contextual factors comes from game theory, which makes predictions about the incentive structures under which organisms are likely to cooperate. Incentive structures in which small immediate costs of cooperation are offset by large immediate benefits, known as mutualisms, commonly lead to cooperation. Even simple organisms—such as fish and ants—readily engage in cooperation under mutualist incentive structures (Bronstein, 2001; Mesterton-Gibbons & Dugatkin, 1992; Trivers, 1971). While cooperative mutualisms occur readily throughout the animal kingdom, reciprocity--in which short-term costs of cooperation are exchanged in expectation of long-term benefits--is relatively scarce. Indeed, in many cases, these exchanges can be explained by simpler mechanisms such as kin selection, where cooperation does not occur in expectation of any future exchange (i.e., Maynard-Smith, 1965; Trivers, 1971; Stevens et al, 2005). Biologists typically account for high mutualism rates and low reciprocity rates by arguing that mutualism poses relatively few risks (costs are immediate and relatively low and benefits are immediate and relatively high), whereas the additional temporal element of reciprocity makes it fairly risky (costs are immediate and high and future large benefits are tenuous and may never realize; Maynard-Smith, 1965; Stevens et al, 2005; Trivers, 1971). The likelihood of cooperation depends, therefore, on the relation between benefits and costs—in other words, its incentive structure. How incentive structure can affect cooperative behavior is often examined using the prisoner’s dilemma game (Clements & Stephens, 1995; Noe, 2006; Rapoport & Chammah, 1965; Valev & Chater, 2006). The prisoner’s dilemma can be conceptualized in this way: Suppose two children, Bonnie and Clyde, have agreed to charge $3 per

Numbers often bias adults' spatial performance. Because the direction of this bias (left-to-right versus right-to-left) is culture-specific, it has been assumed that spatial-numeric associations develop with reading practice or schooling. The authors tested this assumption by examining spatial-numeric associations in pre-reading preschoolers. Preschoolers were shown two boxes (sample and matching boxes) subdivided into seven verbally numbered "rooms" (e.g., "the four room"). A "winner" card was revealed in the sample box, and children searched for the "winner" in the matching box (located in the same-numbered room). Preschoolers were faster and more accurate when rooms increased numerically from left-to-right versus right-to-left. This advantage was apparently caused by numbers influencing preschoolers' encoding of spatial locations: Ordering of numbers in the sample box affected preschoolers' search greatly, whereas ordering of numbers in the matching box did not. The authors conclude that numeric effects on spatial encoding develop far too early to be caused by reading practice or schooling.

Cooperation often fails to spread in proportion to its potential benefits. This phenomenon is captured by prisoner's dilemma games, in which cooperation rates appear to be determined by the distinctive structure of economic incentives (e.g., $3 for mutual cooperation vs. $5 for unilateral defection). Rather than comparing economic values of cooperating versus not ($3 vs. $5), we tested the hypothesis that players simply compare numeric values (3 vs. 5), such that subjective numbers (mental magnitudes) are logarithmically scaled. Supporting our hypothesis, increasing only numeric values of rewards (from $3 to 300¢) increased cooperation (Study 1), whereas increasing economic values increased cooperation only when there were also numeric increases (Study 2). Thus, changing rewards from 3¢ to 300¢ increased cooperation rates, but an economically identical change from 3¢ to $3 elicited no gains. Finally, logarithmically scaled reward values predicted 97% of variation in cooperation, whereas the face value of economic rewards predicted none. We conclude that representations of numeric value constrain how economic rewards affect cooperation.

Numeric magnitudes often bias adults' spatial performance. Partly because the direction of this bias (left-to-right versus right-to-left) is culture-specific, it has been assumed that the orientation of spatial-numeric associations is a late development, tied to reading practice or schooling. Challenging this assumption, we found that preschoolers expected numbers to be ordered from left-to-right when they searched for objects in numbered containers, when they counted, and (to a lesser extent) when they added and subtracted. Further, preschoolers who lacked these biases demonstrated more immature, logarithmic representations of numeric value than preschoolers who exhibited the directional bias, suggesting that spatial-numeric associations aid magnitude representations for symbols denoting increasingly large numbers.

Primates rely on visual attention to gather knowledge about their environment. The ability to recognize such knowledge-acquisition activity in another may demonstrate one aspect of Theory of Mind. Using a series of experiments in which chimpanzees were presented with a choice between an experimenter whose visual attention was available and another whose vision was occluded, we asked whether chimpanzees understood the relationship between visual attention and knowledge states. The animals showed sophisticated understanding of attention from the first presentation of each task. Under more complex experimental conditions, the subjects had more difficulty with species-typical processing of attentional cues and those likely to be learned during human contact. We discuss the results with respect to the comparative impact of enculturation on chimpanzees. (C) 2008 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Recent evidence for different tool kits, proposed to be based upon culture-like transmission, have been observed across different chimpanzee communities across Western Africa. In light of these findings, the reported failures by seven captive juvenile chimpanzees tested with 27 tool use tasks (Povinelli 2000) seem enigmatic. Here we report successful performance by a group of nine captive, enculturated chimpanzees, and limited success by a group of six semi-enculturated chimpanzees, on two of the Povinelli tasks, the Flimsy Tool task, and the Hybrid Tool task. All chimpanzees were presented with a rake with a flimsy head and a second rake with a rigid head, either of which could be used to attempt to retrieve a food reward that was out of reach. The rigid rake was constructed such that it had the necessary functional features to permit successful retrieval, while the flimsy rake did not. Both chimpanzee groups in the present experiment selected the functional rigid tool correctly to use during the Flimsy Tool task. All animals were then presented with two "hybrid rakes" A and B, with one half of each rake head constructed from flimsy, non-functional fabric, and the other half of the head was made of wood. Food rewards were placed in front of the rigid side of Rake A and the flimsy side of Rake B. To be successful, the chimps needed to choose the rake that had the reward in front of the rigid side of the rake head. The fully enculturated animals were successful in selecting the functional rake, while the semi-enculturated subjects chose randomly between the two hybrid tools. Compared with findings from Povinelli, whose non-enculturated animals failed both tasks, our results demonstrate that chimpanzees reared under conditions of semi-enculturation could learn to discriminate correctly the necessary tool through trial-and-error during the Flimsy Tool task, but were unable to recognize the functional relationship necessary for retrieving the reward with the "hybrid" rake. In contrast, the enculturated chimpanzees were correct in their choices during both the Flimsy Tool and the Hybrid Tool tasks. These results provide the first empirical evidence for the differential effects of enculturation on subsequent tool use capacities in captive chimpanzees.