Dalila Bovet

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor at University Paris Nanterre

Des lézards en train de s’accoupler, deux albatros qui élèvent ensemble leurs petits, des singes qui échangent des contacts sexuels pour le plaisir ou pour sceller alliances et réconciliations… À première vue, ces comportements peuvent sembler ordinaires. Mais ils surprennent lorsqu’on s’aperçoit qu’ils peuvent se produire en l’absence de mâles. Le...

The human-dog relationships within the teams working in olfactory search within the French Armed Forces have not been investigated through an exploratory and qualitative approach. In order to expand knowledge on this professional and relational modality, semi-structured interviews were conducted with dog handlers from the French Army (n=16) perform...

Music may be one of the oldest forms of art, and its appreciation is thought to be universal among humans. Music could also represent a useful tool to improve captive animals’ welfare, especially if individuals can choose the music they prefer. The ability to discriminate between different kinds of music or composers has been demonstrated in numero...

Studies on the relationships and interactions within human-dog teams in the French Army are scarce. In order to better understand this subject, a qualitative exploratory study was undertaken by conducting semi-structured interviews with dog handlers (n = 16). The interviewees work in the French Army. They are specialized in the detection and neutra...

Emotions are omnipresent in many animals' lives. It is a complex concept that encompasses physiological, subjective, behavioural and cognitive aspects. While the complex relationship between emotion and cognition has been well studied in humans and in some nonhuman primates, it remains rather unexplored for other nonhuman primate species, such as l...

Emotions are omnipresent in many animals’ lives. It is a complex concept that encompasses physiological, subjective, behavioural and cognitive aspects. While the complex relationship between emotion and cognition is well studied in humans, it has yet to be explored in other primate species, such as lemurs. In our study, we evaluated the performance...

Ce chapitre met en évidence que loin d’être l’exception parmi les animaux, les comportements homosexuels et l’homoparentalité font partie du répertoire sexuel habituel des animaux, en captivité mais aussi dans leur environnement naturel. Nous nous sommes limités dans ce chapitre aux oiseaux et aux mammifères, chez lesquels les comportements de soin...

Les émotions chez les animaux non humains suscitent de plus en plus d’intérêt depuis une trentaine d’années. Cet intérêt va de pair avec un souci accru pour le bien-être animal. De façon plus fondamentale, des études comparatives investiguant quels animaux éprouvent quels types d’émotions sont cruciales pour comprendre les comportements animaux ain...

Ethnozootechnie Les relations au sein des équipes homme-chien exerçant en détection et en pistage dans la Gendarmerie Nationale n’ont jamais été étudiées dans une perspective psychosociale. Afin de comprendre le sens du métier et les rôles des chiens, 10 entretiens semi-directifs ont été menés avec des gendarmes cynophiles. L’analyse thématique de...

Literature often assumed that prosocial behaviours (behaviours that benefit others with or without a cost for the actor) would have evolved many species to improve the effectiveness of parental care (Decety and Cowell 2014). While this hypothesis is rarely questioned at a phylogenetic scale, it was never tested at an individual scale to the best of...

While the interaction between emotions and cognition is relatively well known in humans, it remains to be explored in non-human primates, whose dedicated studies are carried out on a limited diversity of species, preventing us from discussing the evolutionary origin of this interaction. Here, we explored this cognition-emotion interaction in the gr...

Prosociality (behaviours that benefit to a recipient without necessarily involving a cost to the actor) has recently been shown to exist in various taxa, including birds. Studies on prosociality in primates found that prosocial tendencies of the subject could be related to sex and parental care, communication from the recipient, cognitive abilities...

Il est désormais tenu pour acquis que beaucoup d'animaux, des chimpanzés aux chiens, ont des comportements variables selon le lieu où ils se trouvent et suivant leur environnement. Pour chacune de ces espèces, de plus en plus nombreuses, les scientifiques évoquent des cultures, des sociabilités, des individualités différentes selon les lieux donc s...

The goal of this review is twofold: first to explore whether mutual exclusivity and functional fixedness overlap and what might be their respective specificities and second, to investigate whether mutual exclusivity as an inferential principle could be applied in other domains than language and whether it can be found in non-human species. In order...

Prosocial behaviours (providing benefits to a recipient with or without cost for the donor) have been found to be highly influenced by sex and by hierarchy. Rodents, in particular, are good model for studying prosocial responses, as they were found to exhibit intentional prosocial behaviours to reward a conspecific, and are very sensitive to recipr...

In this chapter, the authors are interested in how animals (including humans) perceive the world and construct their sensory universes by combining the information provided to them by their different senses. Sensory receptors convert the energy of a stimulus into nerve impulses for transmission to the central nervous system. In biology, there are m...

Some moral behaviours, often regarded as reflecting high cognitive abilities (such as empathy, cooperation, targeted helping) are known to only be present in very few species, like great apes, elephants and cetaceans. Prosocial behaviours (producing a benefit for the recipient without necessarily involving a cost for the actor) have been mostly fou...

Parrots belong to the handful of animal species capable of vocal production learning. They are considered to be open-ended learners with complex and variable vocalizations. It is not known, however, to what extent their repertoires are shared among individuals within a group or between vocally isolated individuals or groups. In study 1, we mapped t...

L’une des caractéristiques essentielles des êtres vivants concerne l’explosion de leurs formes, liée à la diversité des milieux auxquels ils se sont adaptés. Fruit de la collaboration de spécialistes internationaux, cet ouvrage analyse la multiplicité de ces morphologies. Il traite de l’origine des formes, de leur rôle dans la définition du vivant...

La musicalité ( i.e. l’ensemble des capacités associées à la perception, à l’appréciation et la production musicale) est largement répandue chez notre espèce. Selon certains chercheurs, elle aurait évolué car elle favoriserait la survie et/ou la reproduction. Ainsi, les origines biologiques de la musicalité ont été étudiées dans la littérature, che...

Plus aucune science ne peut penser les animaux à elle seule, ni prétendre pouvoir faire le tour de la question : pour mieux lire les animaux, il faut croiser les sciences. C’est devenu une évidence entre les différentes sciences de la nature, où des croisements ont déjà donné naissance à des hybrides devenus disciplines à part entière, telle l’écol...

An interest in producing sounds during play behaviour might be a forerunner for music. Thus, we explored object play behaviour involving sounds in cockatiels ( Nymphicus hollandicus ). We provided them with several objects producing sounds and recorded sound production, spontaneous warbles and drumming during breeding, pre- and post-breeding. Birds...

Food sharing has attracted much attention because of its apparently altruistic nature and its link to prosociality. However, food sharing has been mostly studied in a reproductive context, during courtship and parental care, where the fitness benefits are obvious. We still lack a clear understanding of the functions of food sharing outside any repr...

Vocal communication is used across the animal kingdom to transfer information from emitters to receivers, such as size, sex, age, dominance status or even emotional states. The transmission of an emotional state from one individual to another is called “emotional contagion” and is classified as the first level of empathy. Emotional contagion is tho...

Schematic representation of the crest positions. Crest 1 position is characteristic of a stressed or attentive bird, with clearly separated feathers. The second position is intermediate and is characteristic of a middle stressed or attentive bird. The Crest 3 position is observed in entirely relaxed birds e.g. while resting. (DOCX)

Randomization of conditions depending on the subjects and the days of testing. P: Partner, NP: Non-partner, WN: White Noise. (PDF)

Histograms of activity, number of calls emitted, time spent in zone 1 and time spent in crest position 1 during a phase. Results from all type of phases (before, during, after) and all type of calls (partner, non-partner, white noise) are pooled. (PDF)

Urban species often adjust their behavior to survive in urban environments, characterized by the proximity of humans, habitat fragmentation and heterogeneous, fluctuating ecological resources. Several hypotheses have been put forth to explain how species manage living in heterogeneous and complex anthropogenic habitats. The ability of individuals o...

Tool use by nonhuman animals has received much research attention in the last couple of decades. Nevertheless, research has focused mostly on vertebrates, particularly primates and corvids, even though tool use has also been documented in insects. One of the best documented examples involves ants using debris (e.g. sand grains, mud, leaf fragments)...

Emotional state may influence cognitive processes such as attention and decision-making. A cognitive judgement bias is the propensity to anticipate either positive or negative consequences in response to ambiguous information. Recent work, mainly on vertebrates, showed that the response to ambiguous stimuli might change depending on an individual’s...

The perception of self is an important topic in several disciplines such as ethology, behavioral ecology, psychology, developmental and cognitive neuroscience. Self-perception is investigated by experimentally exposing different species of animals to self-stimuli such as their own image, smell or vocalizations. Here we review more than one hundred...

Besides direct impacts of urban biodiversity on local ecosystem services, the contact of city dwellers with urban nature in their everyday life could increase their awareness on conservation issues. In this paper, we focused on a particularly common animal urban species, the feral pigeon Columba livia. Through an observational approach, we examined...

Recent advances in ethology tend to consider animals as moral agents. Only a few species are studied (mainly primates), and two main thematics are investigated: empathy-related behaviours and feelings of injustice. These thematics match some studies conducted in moral psychology and moral philosophy that suggest that our moral capacity is based on...

The present study tested intentionality of a learned begging gesture and attention-reading abilities in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Subjects were trained to produce a begging gesture towards a hidden food reward that could be delivered by a human experimenter. More specifically, we investigated which attentional cues-body, face and/or eyes or...

We tested here whether Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana), trained to produce a pointing gesture, modify their behaviour in response to different human's attentional states. More specifically, we investigated the macaque's ability to communicate intentionally about the location of an unreachable hidden food reward in several contexts which differ b...

Sexe et nourriture ont souvent fait bon ménage. « Chair fraîche », « péché de chair », « orgie » ou « femme dévoreuse d'hommes » sont autant d'expressions qui traversent le discours populaire, la littérature ou le cinéma. Dans son film Maris et Femmes, Woody Allen décrivait ainsi une de ses ex-compagnes comme une femme « sexuellement carnivore ». A...

Pourquoi les femmes sont-elles sujettes à la ménopause ? Cette question reste en grande partie mystérieuse. Logiquement, les mécanismes biologiques de l'évolution font en sorte que les invididus ne vivent guère longtemps au-delà de leur période de procréation. La ménopause est ainsi rarissime, et ne se produit que dans l'espèce humaine, ainsi que c...

Les etudes portant sur les precurseurs de la Theorie de l’Esprit tels que la comprehension des etats attentionnels d’autrui ont ete largement menees chez les grands singes et ont rapporte des resultats discordants. Tandis que de nombreuses etudes ont revele que les grands singes prennent en compte l’etat attentionnel d’autrui en se basant sur des i...

Food-sharing occurs largely in birds, especially during courtship and parental care. This behavior has been the subject of much attention because of its apparent altruistic nature and its possible impact on the evolution of complex cognition in human and non-human primates. One of the functions of food-sharing may be to build and strengthen bonds b...

On rencontre, dans le monde animal, trois degrés de sensibilité aux influences négatives de l’environnement : la nociception, la douleur et la souffrance. La nociception, qui existe chez la plupart des animaux, permet d’éviter, de façon réflexe, les stimulations portant atteinte à l’intégrité de l’organisme ; elle se traduit par des réponses de fui...

Les chercheurs qui étudient la perception de la douleur chez les animaux constatent régulièrement un fait étonnant : les souris et les rats semblent moins sensibles à la douleur quand c'est un homme qui les manipule que lorsqu'il s'agit d'une femme. Pour autant, ce fait régulièrement observé est-il à prendre au sérieux dans les expériences ? Un art...

Qui aurait imaginé que des tortues utiliseraient un jour des écrans tactiles pour obtenir à manger ? C'est pourtant ce qu'observe depuis quelques mois l'éthologue Anna Wilkinson à l'Université du Wymoning, aux États-Unis. Esme est l'une des pensionnaires du laboratoire, et travaille avec son écran tactile pour obtenir une fraise. La tâche n'est a p...

Being able to count quickly and to differenciate two numerical quantities represent advantages in both humans and other animals. It is crucial to choose and prefer the spot which contains most food, most other resources and to fight enemies in numerical inferiority (McComb et al 1994). Research demonstrated the existence of behaviors where quantifi...

Living in society gives many advantages but also requires some adaptations in order to maintain unity and efficiency in the group. Prosocial behavior, which aims to improve the other’s welfare and is motivated by empathy, is a good example of such adaptation. This behavior would have appeared via parental care and a widespread hypothesis argues tha...

Living in society gives many advantages but also requires some adaptations in order to maintain unity and efficiency in the group. Prosocial behavior, which aims to improve the other’s welfare and is motivated by empathy, is a good example of such adaptation. This behavior would have appeared via parental care and a widespread hypothesis argues tha...

Dans une clairière, un paon fait la roue devant une femelle. Celle-ci est séduite et le montre par des postures d'invitation à la copulation. L'affaire semble conclue, pourtant le mâle pousse encore un cri strident avant de se précipiter vers elle pour copuler. Paradoxe ! Ce cri ne représente aucun avantage apparent pour le mâle, et pourrait même a...

Certains se souviennent peut-être de Z et Vielpunkt, deux manchots de Humboldt du zoo de Bremerhaven, en Allemagne. Ils ont défrayé la chronique, bien qu'à première vue, rien ne les distingue d'autres manchots : ils nagent, construisent leur nid, passent tout leur temps ensemble, se toilettent mutuellement, font des parades, s'accouplent, élèvent l...

Si l'on vous disait qu'un pigeon peut distinguer un Picasso d'un Renoir, vous auriez sûrement envie de sourire. Et pourtant, vous ririez moins si vous saviez que ces volatiles, et bien d'autres animaux, démontrent d'étonnantes capacités de discrimination artistique.Récemment, au Japon, un éthologue du nom de Shigeru Watanabe a montré que des souris...

Birdsong in oscine birds serves both intrasexual and intersexual functions. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of how birdsong is involved in female reproductive activity using the domestic canary as a model. Some special song phrases containing bipartite syllables composed of abrupt frequency falls and short silence...

Demonstrations of nonhuman ability to share resources and reciprocate such sharing seem contingent upon the experimental paradigm used (note Horner et al. in PNAS 108:13847-13851, 2011). Here, such behaviour in Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) was tested in two experiments, both designed to avoid possible issues involving apparatus complexity, vi...

Background / Purpose: Parrots are well known for their advanced intelligence. Tested in different physical tasks they display flexible behaviours and are able to solve complex problems. We decided to look at the psittacid family bird diversity while solving various folk physical problems. Main conclusion: Birds engaged in all the conditions mo...

Research on human morality in the social and human sciences draws on a range of approaches and perspectives (development, gender differences, cultural differences, etc.). However, with very few exceptions, the term "morality" remains a taboo when applied to animals, despite the increasing interest in the biological foundations of human morality and...

Léo, un perroquet gris du Gabon, a une passion pour les claviers d’ordinateurs : il adore en détacher les touches. Dans notre laboratoire, à l’Université Paris Ouest, nous élevons quelques perroquets et en étudions le comportement. Bien sûr, je n’apprécie guère de retrouver toutes les touches de mon ordinateur arrachées, voire cassées, je le chasse...

Les parents savent bien que l'on s'adresse à son bébé en adoptant un langage qui peut faire sourire, en allongeant certaines syllabes et en faisant chanter sa voix. Qui n'a jamais surpris un parent en train de produire des mimiques cocasses en prononçant des phrases telles que : « Kicé le bébé à sa mamaaaan ? » Ce langage « bébé » que nous adoptons...

Les propriétaires de chevaux savent que certaines montures sont plus fougueuses que d'autres, et les propriétaires de chiens parlent volontiers du tempérament de leur compagnon. Pour autant, peut-on parler de caractère ou de personnalité comme on le fait en psychologie pour les êtres humains ?Une réponse originale a été récemment apportée à cette q...

For some endangered parrot species, captive breeding may be the only insurance for their survival. However, many individuals in captivity do not reproduce. Artificial insemination (AI) may help overcome reproductive failures or geographic distance. For semen collection in birds, massage is the most commonly used method. However, this process, which...

Considered as plague in many cities, pigeons in urban areas live close to human activities and exploit this proximity to find food which is often directly delivered by people. In this study, we explored the capacity of feral pigeons to take advantage of this human-based food resource and discriminate between friendly and hostile people. Our study w...

Perspective-taking is a cognitive ability that can be useful to access information during social interactions. This ability is extensively exploited in humans, and some evidence of it has been found in other mammals and some bird species. Perspective-taking requires individuals to be sensitive to the attentional state of others. In this experiment,...

A few animal species are capable of vocal learning. Parrots are well known for their vocal imitation abilities. In this study, we investigated whether African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) emit specific vocalizations in specific contexts. We first described the vocal repertoire and its ontogenesis of four captive grey parrots. After a comparis...

A crucial step in the understanding of vocal behavior of birds is to be able to classify calls in the repertoire into meaningful types. Methods developed to this aim are limited either because of human subjectivity or because of methodological issues. The present study investigated whether a feature generation system could categorize vocalizations...

One of the main characteristics of human societies is the extensive degree of cooperation among individuals. Cooperation is an elaborate phenomenon, also found in non-human primates during laboratory studies and field observations of animal hunting behaviour, among other things. Some authors suggest that the pressures assumed to have favoured the e...

Intentionality plays a fundamental part in human social interactions and we know that interpretation of behaviours of conspecifics depends on the intentions underlying them. Most of the studies on intention attribution were undertaken with primates. However, very little is known on this topic in animals more distantly related to humans such as bird...

Parrots are well known for their imitative abilities of human speech. Since a few years, some research studies have highlighted complex cognitive skills of some parrot species, especially of African grey parrots. However, to date, complete studies on the vocal abilities of these birds are missing. We thus carried out different experiments to evalua...

Living in social groups presents the opportunity to use information provided by other individuals. Several animal species emit specific vocalizations when they find food. Here, we investigate whether African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) use vocal and non-vocal information provided by a conspecific in order to find a hidden food source. One su...

Integration of information coming from several sensory modalities is crucial for communication and individual recognition in many species. In this experiment, we tested 6 grey-cheeked mangabeys with still pictures and vocalizations of familiar conspecifics. During the tests, the subjects faced 2 computer screens. Pictures of different familiar cons...

Humans and other animals often find it difficult to choose a delayed reward over an immediate one, even when the delay leads to increased pay-offs. Using a visible incremental reward procedure, we tested the ability of three grey parrots to maintain delay of gratification for an increasingly valuable food pay-off. Up to five sunflower seeds were pl...

The ability to categorize elements of the environment is a fundamental aspect of information processing. Many experiments demonstrate the ability of birds and non-human primates to classify items according to their perceptual similarities. Few data are available regarding spontaneous classification of items according to a non-perceptual account in...

A wealth of research in infants and animals demonstrates discrimination of quantities, in some cases nonverbal numerical perception, and even elementary calculation capacities. We investigated the ability of three African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) to select the largest amount of food between two sets, either discrete food items (experiment...

One advantage of living in a social group is the opportunity to use information provided by other individuals. Social information can be based on cues provided by a conspecific or even by a heterospecific individual (e.g., gaze direction, vocalizations, pointing gestures). Although the use of human gaze and gestures has been extensively studied in...

Three-year-old children were tested on three categorization tasks of increasing levels of abstraction (used with adult baboons in an earlier study): the first was a conceptual categorization task (food vs toys), the second a perceptual matching task (same vs different objects), and the third a relational matching task in which the children had to s...

The authors trained 3 adult male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to categorize pairs of unknown conspecifics presented in a video according to the dominance status of the videotaped monkeys. The subjects were trained to choose the dominant monkey for a category of films (e.g., films showing 1 monkey chasing another); then, new films were presented...

Baboons (Papio anubis) were tested on categorization tasks at two different conceptual levels. The monkeys showed their ability (1) to judge as identical or different the objects belonging to two categories, on a perceptual basis, and (2) to perform a judgment of conceptual identity-that is, to use the same/different relation between two previously...