Anna Wilkinson

University of Lincoln · School of Life Sciences

SIMON, T., K. Guo, E. Frasnelli, A. Wilkinson and D.S. Mills. Testing of behavioural asymmetries as markers for brain lateralization of emotional states in pet dogs: a critical review. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV XX(X) XXX-XXX, XXXX. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) hold a unique position in human society, particularly in their role as social companions;...

Research with humans and other animals has suggested that preferential limb use is linked to emotionality. A better understanding of this still under-explored area has the potential to establish limb preference as a marker of emotional vulnerability and risk for affective disorders. This study explored the potential relationship between paw prefere...

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the im...

A growing number of reptiles are being kept as companion animals in private households, and this has resulted in a concomitant rise in welfare concerns. Poor welfare has been linked to a lack of the emotional attachment in other groups. The aim of this study was to investigate owner attachment to pet reptiles, grouped as lizards, snakes, and tortoi...

Vision in dogs is generally considered poor compared with humans, and recent reports have reviewed some of the physiological principles underpinning dog vision, but a systematic comparison of the physiological and neurobiological features of vision in dogs compared with humans appears to be lacking. This means there is a risk of an anthropocentric...

Long-term torpor is an adaptive strategy that allows animals to survive harsh winter conditions. However, the impact that prolonged torpor has on cognitive function is poorly understood. Hibernation causes reduced synaptic activity and experiments with mammals reveal that this can have adverse effects on memories formed prior to hibernation. The im...

In recent years red-footed tortoises have been shown to be proficient in a number of spatial cognition tasks that involve movement of the animal through space (e.g., the radial maze). The present study investigated the ability of the tortoise to learn a spatial task in which the response required was simply to touch a stimulus presented in a given...

Knowledge of previous encounters with conspecifics is thought to be beneficial as it allows fast and appropriate behavioral responses toward those animals. This level of categorization goes beyond perceptual similarity and requires the individual to refer to a more abstract common referent, namely familiarity. It has been shown that pigeons are abl...

To recognize that a picture is a representation of a real-life object is a cognitively demanding task. It requires an organism to mentally represent the concrete object (the picture) and abstract its relation to the item that it represents. This form of representational insight has been shown in a small number of mammal and bird species. However, i...

Despite growing evidence for the recognition of conspecifics, studies on heterospecific recognition are still scarce. There is some evidence that birds living in urban habitats are able to distinguish between specific humans, depending on their previous experience with them. Nonetheless, the features by which the birds actually discriminated among...

In group-living animals, it is adaptive to recognize conspecifics on the basis of familiarity or group membership as it allows association with preferred social partners and avoidance of competitors. However, animals do not only associate with conspecifics but also with heterospecifics, for example in mixed-species flocks. Consequently, between-spe...

The radial-arm maze is an established method for testing an animal's spatial win-shift behavior. Research on mammals, birds, and fish has shown that the mastery of this task is commonly mediated, to different degrees, by two types of strategy: those based on external cues and those based on response stereotypy. In the present study we trained four...

Reptiles, birds, and mammals evolved from a common amniotic ancestor and it is likely that they share both behavioral and morphological traits. Equally, since this ancestor lived around 280 million years ago there is ample time for very diff erent capacities and mechanisms to have evolved. To more fully understand the evolution of cognition, it is...

Spatial cognition is an essential survival tool and a much studied area of cognition in mammals and birds. The radialarm maze is a commonly used spatial cognition task, which requires an animal to move to a number of different locations and avoid revisits to previously rewarded ones. Although much is known about mammalian and avian radial maze beha...

Three hypotheses have attempted to explain the phenomenon of contagious yawning. It has been hypothesized that it is a fixed action pattern for which the releasing stimulus is the observation of another yawn, that it is the result of non-conscious mimicry emerging through close links between perception and action or that it is the result of empathy...

The mechanisms underlying tracking and capture of moving objects in non-human animals are poorly understood. This set of experiments sought to further explore aspects of anticipatory tracking in pigeons and to conduct comparisons with human participants. In Experiment 1a, pigeons were presented with two types of varying velocities (fast-slow-fast o...

Evolutionary biology has uncovered remarkable anatomical and physiological similarities among animal species (including humans). The most parsimonious assumption is that they may also share some cognitive and behavioural traits. This idea was put forward by Charles Darwin, who suggested that humans are not separated from the animal kingdom in terms...

Gaze following refers to the ability of an animal to orient its gaze direction to that of another organism. Such a behavior may be adaptive as it alerts the observer to important objects in the environment such as food or predators. This behavior has been shown in mammals and birds, but the evolutionary history and the distribution of this behavior...

It is widely accepted that group-living animals alter their behaviour towards a conspecific depending on whether it is known or unknown. To distinguish between group members and strangers in an efficient way, it would be adaptive for an animal to categorize conspecifics on the basis of familiarity. We investigated whether pigeons, Columba livia, ar...

The ability to learn from the actions of another is adaptive, as it is a shortcut for acquiring new information. However, the evolutionary origins of this trait are still unclear. There is evidence that group-living mammals, birds, fishes and insects can learn through observation, but this has never been investigated in reptiles. Here, we show that...

Much research has investigated spatial cognition in mammals and birds. Evidence suggests that the hippocampus plays a critical role in this; however, reptiles do not possess a hippocampus. It has been proposed that the reptilian medial cortex plays a similar role, yet little behavioral research has directly investigated this. Consequently, this stu...

Although the pigeon is a popular model for studying visual perception, relatively little is known about its perception of motion. Three experiments examined the pigeons' ability to capture a moving stimulus. In Experiment 1, the effect of manipulating stimulus speed and the length of the stimulus was examined using a simple rightward linear motion....

A single tortoise (Geochelone carbonaria) was trained in an eight-arm radial maze, with the apparatus and general procedures modeled on those used to demonstrate spatial learning in rats. The tortoise learned to perform reliably above chance, preferentially choosing baited arms, rather than returning to arms previously visited on a trial. Test sess...

Three experiments examined various facets of the perception of continuous and discontinuous line segments in pigeons. Pigeons were presented with 2 straight lines that were interrupted by a gap. In some instances, the lines were the same angle and were positioned so that they appeared (to human observers) to form a continuous line. In other instanc...

Rats received exposure to 3 flavor compounds, AX and BX, presented in alternation, and CX, presented on a separate block of trials. The hypothesis that this treatment would leave B effectively more salient than C was tested in 3 ways. Experiment 1 showed that the unconditioned response evoked by B was stronger than that evoked by C. Experiment 2 sh...