Behavioural Processes June 2018

From the June issue of Behavioural Processes 

There’s an article on assortative mating based on body size in an explosive-breeding toad. No reason to discuss this, but how often do you get to use assortative, body-size, and explosive-breeding in the same sentence?!

Rodriguez, hendickson & Rasmussen (2018) report a new Probabilistic Food Choice Questionnaire for studying delay discounting with humans. (Odd paper for BP to publish, I thought.)

In the same issue, Rung, Argyle, Siri & Madden (2018) compared three variations on delay-discounting tasks with college students, showing limitations and messiness in all three, but slightly favored a titrating paradigm over fixed alternative and visual-analogue methods.

Sato, Fujishita & Yamagishi (2018) examined cognitive mapping by rats in a ‘lattice maze’ (which looks like a Dashiell maze but with some interior walls). Really nice generalization and shortcut behavior by the rats, demonstrating what I think has already been convincingly demonstrated numerous times. The rats took the shortcut when in fact it would save time, but not when it led to an inefficient detour.



Nacarova, Vesely & Fuchs (2018) looked at individual differences in birds’ performance on tests of exploratory behavior (e.g., neophobia, startle), to determine whether slow-explorers differed from fast-explorers in threat recognition. The results aren’t very interesting (fast explorers are less ‘attentive’ and slow explorers categorized more conditions as threatening), but I thought it was another interesting example of trying to find relations between individual-differences measures