Journal Summaries

April 30, 2018

Submitted by MJB regarding journal Animal Behavior and Cognition

A new issue of AB&C came out yesterday. A couple of exciting things in here for me to highlight. First, Audrey and I published a peer-reviewed, pre-registered report, that we designed with a high school student who contacted me a year and a half ago. It is about the decoy effect, in a particular approach. We trained monkeys to be fairly indifferent between PURSUIT and MTS icons, and then introduced more terrible versions of one of these tasks into trinary choice sets, to see if the more terrible version (e.g., longer PURSUIT time needed, or much slower cursor for MTS responding) would lead monkeys to choose the asymmetrically dominating option (e.g., chose MTS more over PURSUIT when the MTS decoy was present, and vice versa). We failed to get this effect, in the pre-registered experiment and in a replication of that effort, but with even less allowance for initial preferences between MTS and PURSUIT. We are not entirely sure why, but likely the monkeys came to ignore the decoys or perhaps not learn about them in a way that made then truly “like” their partner tasks.

In another featured article in this issue, there is a good paper on dogs and owners, and how dogs respond to owners. It was done in a natural setting, and shows some real limits on what dogs seem to do, and what owners do, when communicating about games involving toys. And, there is a very nice Appendix to this article that criticizes some past work with dogs and apes about statistical analysis and what was reported.

Finally, there is an article on a cockatoo that kind of used tools, for those interested in too use. The bird seems to combine materials with foraging for coconut material, although the evidence is not super strong. But, if you are interested, check that one out as well.

All of these articles are free online, and can be downloaded here:

http://animalbehaviorandcognition.org/issue.php?id=19