Ákos Pogány

Eötvös Loránd University · Department of Ethology

Parental care plays a central, reinforcing role in the evolution of sex roles and its development is often reported to be driven by genetic, rather than environmental effects. Based on these studies, however, genetic inheritance does not account fully for the often-significant phenotypic variability observed within species, a variation that we hypo...

Social living, long lifespan and advanced cognitive skills provided favourable conditions for the development of pro-social behaviours and cooperative activities in cetacean. Dolphins have been observed to collaborate for various purposes, finding food, finding mates or raising and teaching younger individuals. This study investigated the potential...

Mobile touch screen devices (MTSDs; i.e., smartphones and tablets) are now being used at an early and neuroplastic age by an ever-growing number of children, with this use likely affecting cognitive development. In a cross-sectional study, we investigated whether frequent MTSD user preschoolers exhibit different attentional and socio-cognitive skil...

Parental care is among the most widespread and variable behavioral traits between and within species, associated often both with large fitness costs and benefits. Despite its fitness consequences and evolutionary significance, we know very little about the ontogeny of this behavior, specifically, whether and how social experiences from parents cont...

In sexually reproducing species, parents and offspring have different optima in terms of the amount of parental investment. For offspring, higher investment than the parental optimum generally increases their fitness. However, such higher investment will, in theory, result in net parental fitness loss because increased benefits from current offspri...

Cognitive enrichments have gained popularity in the past two decades in both farm animal and zoological settings. In this study, we present a cognitive enrichment device that, for the first time, allowed testing for prosocial food-sharing actions in dolphins. The device was made of a PVC tube and two caps with rope handles; one handle was fixed to...

Over the past two decades, farm animal-assisted therapies have become popular. However, the effects of farm animals on healthy people’s mental states have not yet been investigated. In Study 1, we aimed to explore whether positive effects of human-animal interaction (HAI) can be detected in healthy farm volunteers even after short-term (2–3 hours)...

The early use of mobile touchscreen devices (MTSDs), including smartphones and tablets, may reduce the frequency and quality of social interactions between children and parents, which could impact their relationship and have negative consequences on children's socio-cognitive development. In this study, we applied a parental questionnaire and a beh...

We investigated the spontaneous tendency of dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human, in the absence of food reward. Based on dogs’ inherent sociality and domestication history, we predicted that the tendency to match human actions is more pronounced in this species than in the other two. To tes...

Ex-situ research in aquariums and zoological settings not only support scientific advancement, they also provide opportunities for education, facilitating both mental and physical stimulation, consequently improving welfare. This study aimed to investigate the impact of cognitive testing on the well-being of a group of male Indo-Pacific bottlenose...

Alliance formation plays a crucial part in male dolphins’ lives. These partnerships may last for decades or even for a lifetime; thus, partner choice and the maintenance of these relationships are both considered key components of alliance formation. In our previous investigations, pairs of adult male dolphins showed a high success rate in cooperat...

(1) Background: The objective of this study was to uncover genomic causes of parental care. Since birds do not lactate and, therefore, do not show the gene expressional changes required for lactation, we investigate gene expression associated with parenting in caring and non-caring females in an avian species, the small passerine bird zebra finch (...

Due to the diversity of the phenomenon, dolphin cooperation has attracted considerable research interest in both wild popu- lations and those under human care. Dolphins cooperate in various contexts, including group hunting, alloparental care, social learning, social play and alliance formation for securing mates. This investigation focused on the...

Internship programmes have grown in popularity in many academic fields, including marine mammal science. These programmes provide invaluable opportunities for early-career scientists to obtain practical and hands-on experience with a rare insight into the day-to-day operation of a research team. Working in the field of marine mammal science require...

Little is known about head-tilts in dogs. Based on previous investigations on the head-turning and the lateralised brain pattern of human speech processing in dogs, we hypothesised that head-tilts may be related to increased attention and could be explained by lateralised mental functions. We observed 40 dogs during object-label knowledge tests and...

This study shows evidence of a domestic cat (Felis catus) being able to successfully learn to reproduce human-demonstrated actions based on the Do as I Do paradigm. The subject was trained to reproduce a small set of familiar actions on command “Do it!” before the study began. To test feature–contingent behavioural similarity and control for stimul...

Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs' increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as performance increase due to training) makes a crucial co...

We investigated whether dogs remember their spontaneous past actions relying on episodic-like memory. Dogs were trained to repeat a small set of actions upon request. Then we tested them on their ability to repeat other actions produced by themselves, including actions performed spontaneously in everyday situations. Dogs repeated their own actions...

In many parts of South and Southeast Asia, rural farmers living at the borders of protected areas frequently encounter Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) raiding their crops and threatening farmers lives and livelihoods. Traditional deterrent methods often have limited success as elephants become habituated or alternate their movement and behavior....

The expression of the recently identified neuropeptide, amylin, is restricted in rodents to the postpartum preoptic area and may play a role in the control of parental behaviours and food intake. These processes are substantially different between bird and rodent parents as birds do not lactate but often show biparental care of the offspring. To es...

Recent studies of the brain mechanisms of parental behaviors have mainly focused on rodents. Using other vertebrate taxa, such as birds, can contribute to a more comprehensive, evolutionary view. In the present study, we investigated a passerine songbird, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), with a biparental caring system. Parenting-related neur...

Introduction: Most of the studies investigating the effect of early rearing environment in dogs used laboratory dogs and reported that early experiences markedly affect the puppies' behavior. However, the subjects of these experiments cannot be considered as representatives of family dogs. Methods: In this study, we investigated whether differen...

Social monogamy, typically characterized by the formation of a pair bond, increased territorial defense, and often biparental care, has independently evolved multiple times in animals. Despite the independent evolutionary origins of monogamous mating systems, several homologous brain regions and neuropeptides and their receptors have been shown to...

A goal-directed action is composed of two main elements on which the observer may focus its attention: the movement performed (i.e., the action) and the outcome (i.e., the goal). In a social learning situation, consequently, the observer may imitate the action of the model or emulate the result of its action. In humans and primates, the tendency to...

Social learning is especially advantageous for young individuals because it reduces the risks of trial-and-error learning, while providing an efficient way of acquiring information. Whereas adult dogs are known to excel in social learning skills, the ontogeny of this process has been mainly overlooked. The focus of our study was to investigate whet...

Social referencing is the process by which individuals utilize cues from emotional displays of a social partner to form their response to a new situation. Social referencing can provide advantages, especially to young, inexperienced individuals, by favouring an appropriate reaction to novel situations while avoiding the risks of trial and error lea...

Excessive food intake and the resulting excess weight gain is a growing problem in human and canine populations. Dogs, due to their shared living environment with humans, may provide a beneficial model to study the causes and consequences of obesity. Here, we make use of two well-established research paradigms (two-way choice paradigm and cognitive...

Consistent individual behavioural differences ('animal personalities') are documented across a variety of animal taxa. Sexual selection, especially assortative mating has been suggested as a possible mechanism contributing to the maintenance of different personality types within populations but little is known about non-random pair-formation with r...

The domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is a promising animal model. Yet, the canine neuroscience literature is predominantly comprised of studies wherein (semi-)invasive methods and intensive training are used to study awake dog behavior. Given prior findings with humans and/or dogs, our goal was to assess, in 16 family dogs (1.5–7 years old; 10 males...

Humans have a tendency to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. Although animacy is considered as a complex cognitive property, this recognition seems to be spontaneous. Researchers have found that young human infants discriminate between dependent and independent movement patterns. However, quick visual perception of a...

Parental care plays a key role in ontogeny, life-history trade-offs, sexual selection and intra-familial conflict. Studies focusing on understanding causes and consequences of variation in parental effort need to quantify parental behaviour accurately. The applied methods are, however, diverse even for a given species and type of parental effort, a...

Diurnal variation of parental effort in zebra finches on day 17 post-hatching. Mean ± SE proportion of 1h observation periods spent brooding between 7:00–19:00. Blue filled squares represent male, red filled circles female, grey filled triangles joint (male and female simultaneous), and grey open diamonds total brooding (when at least one parent br...

Within-reproductive stage consistency of parental effort during incubation in zebra finches. The figure shows the proportion of 3h periods spent incubating and inside the nest (nest attendance) during corresponding periods of late vs. early incubation (day 13 vs. day 3 of incubation). Blue filled squares represent male, red filled circles female, g...

Between-reproductive stage consistency of parental effort in zebra finches. The figure illustrates the proportion of corresponding 3h observation periods (10:00–13:00) spent incubating and brooding (left panes) and inside the nest (right panes) on day 10 post-hatching vs. day 8 of incubation. (EPS)

Diurnal variation of parental effort in zebra finches on day 13 of incubation. Mean ± SE proportion of 1h observation periods spent incubating (a) and in the nest (b) between 7:00–19:00. Blue filled squares represent male, red filled circles female, grey filled triangles joint (male and female simultaneous), and grey open diamonds total parental ef...

Within-reproductive stage consistency of parental effort during nestling provisioning in zebra finches. The figure shows the proportion of 3h periods spent brooding and inside the nest (nest attendance) during corresponding periods of late vs. early nestling provisioning (day 17 vs. day 3 post-hatching). Blue filled squares represent male, red fill...

Behavioural data. (XLSX)

In most passerine birds, individuals attempt to maximise their fitness by providing parental care while also mating outside their pair bond. A sex-specific trade-off between these two behaviours is predicted to occur since the fitness benefits of extra-pair mating differs between the sexes. We use nest observations and parentage analysis to reveal...

The existence of episodic memory in non-human animals is a debated topic that has been investigated using different methodologies that reflect diverse theoretical approaches to its definition. A fundamental feature of episodic memory is recalling after incidental encoding, which can be assessed if the recall test is unexpected [1]. We used a modifi...

Dogs, like human infants, are able to imitate human actions after a delay (deferred imitation). This study demonstrates that in deferred imitation tasks, dogs can generalize imitation across context modification to a certain extent. Specifically, they can imitate an object-related action if the object used by the demonstrator is displaced to a diff...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript peptides (CARTp) are neuropeptides that acts as neurotransmitters in the brain of vertebrates. The expression of CARTp has been characterised in teleost, amphibians and several mammalian species, but comparative data in reptiles and birds is non-existant. In this study, we show the distribution of immun...

This study demonstrates long-term declarative memory of imitative actions in a non-human animal species. We tested 12 pet dogs for their ability to imitate human actions after retention intervals ranging from 1 to 24 h. For comparison, another 12 dogs were tested for the same actions without delay between demonstration and recall. Our test consiste...

Automated behavioural observations are routinely used in many fields of biology, including ethology, behavioural ecology and physiology. When preferences for certain resources are investigated, the focus is often on simple response variables, such as duration and frequency of visits to choice chambers. Here we present an automated motion detector s...

In socially monogamous species, low availability of sexually active unpaired individuals in the local population may constrain mate choice, resulting in mating with sub-optimal partners. Here we experimentally investigate whether female reproductive behaviour is different when paired with a preferred or a non-preferred male in the zebra finch (Taen...

Elaborate male song may restrain competitors in various songbirds, although the exact mechanism, information content and information flow of acoustic signals are not com-pletely understood. Here we focus on the interactions between resident and intruder males using the Eurasian penduline tit Remiz pendulinus. The breeding system of this small passe...

Diverse patterns of parental care, including uniparental care by either the male or the female, provide excellent opportunities to investigate how variation in social traits is maintained in wild populations. Coexistence of different parental strategies within the same population is expected when they exhibit similar cost-benefit ratios. We investi...

In the present study we examined the spatial distribution of the small mammals of a floodplain forest by River Drava based on a three-year live trapping (capture-mark-recapture). We registered the presence of 5 shrew and 5 rodent species between 2001 and 2003. Of them Apodemus agrarius, A. flavicollis, Myodes glareolus and Sorex araneus were genera...

Eurasian penduline tits (Remiz pendulinus) have an unusually diverse breeding system consisting of frequent male and female polygamy, and uniparental care by the male or the female. Intriguingly, 30 to 40 per cent of all nests are deserted by both parents. To understand the evolution of this diverse breeding system and frequent clutch desertion, we...

Engagement in extra-pair copulations is an example of the abundant conflicting interests between males and females over reproduction. Potential benefits for females and the risk of cuckoldry for males are expected to have important implications on the evolution of parental care. However, whether parents adjust parental care in response to parentage...

The evolutionary interests of males and females rarely coincide (sexual conflict), and these conflicting interests influence morphology, behavior and speciation in various organisms. We examined consequences of variation in sexual conflict in two closely-related passerine birds with contrasting breeding systems: the Eurasian penduline tit Remiz pen...

The trade-off between current and future parental investment is often different between males and females. This difference may lead to sexual conflict between parents over care provisioning in animals that breed with multiple mates. One of the most obvious manifestations of sexual conflict over care is offspring desertion whereby one parent deserts...

Secondary sexual characters (e.g. badges, ornaments) are involved in many species in male-male competition and/or in female choice. We tested a proposition, the armament-ornament model, in a small passerine bird, the Eurasian penduline tit Remiz pendulinus, which exhibits an unusually diverse breeding system that includes sequential polygyny and po...

Why do females prefer some males over others? Females often use multiple cues, and to distinguish between these cues one needs to manipulate putative male traits. We carried out a test of multiple cues hypothesis in a polygamous bird, the penduline tit Remiz pendulinus . In this passerine both males and females mate with up to six mates within a br...

Two 1-hectare forest stands were chosen as sampling sites in the monitoring area of river Drava: one was a softwood willow-poplar (Salici-Populetum) gallery forest directly along the river in the neighbourhood of Vízvár, whereas the other was a lowland alder gallery forest (Paridi quadrifoliae-Alnetum) within the Lankóci forest. Quadrate sampling m...