Gabriella Smith

• MA Animal Behavior and Conservation
• PhD Student at University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

Past research on interspecies communication has shown that animals can be trained to use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices, such as soundboards, to make simple requests of their caretakers. The recent uptake in AIC devices by hundreds of pet owners around the world offers a novel opportunity to investigate whether AIC is possibl...

Countless discussions have been generated by the animal language studies, specifically those utilizing mechanical interfaces, termed here Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices (e.g., lexigrams; magnetic chips; keyboards). Overall, three concerns dominate the field: (1) claims that AIC device using animals manifest linguistic skills...

Illusions—visual fields that distort perception—can inform the understanding of visual perception and its evolution. An example of one such illusion, the Rotating Snakes illusion, causes the perception of motion in a series of static concentric circles. The current study investigated pet dogs’ and cats’ perception of the Rotating Snakes illusion in...

Contrafreeloading—working to access food that could be freely obtained—is rarely exhibited and poorly understood. Based on data from Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus), researchers proposed a correlation between contrafreeloading and play: that contrafreeloading is more likely when subjects view the task as play. We tested that hypothesis by subjec...

Contrafreeloading is the choice to perform a physical task to access food over freely available food, a behavior pattern contrary to the predictions of both optimal foraging and learning theories. This study examined the presence and degree of contrafreeloading in Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) and the possible interpretation of such behavior i...

A well-known phenomenon to cat owners is the tendency of their cats to sit in enclosed spaces such as boxes, laundry baskets, and even shape outlines taped on the floor. This investigative study asks whether domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) are also susceptible to sitting in enclosures that are illusory in nature, utilizing cats’ attraction t...

A fundamental question of evolutionary biology is, why are some animals conspicuously colored? This question may be addressed from both a proximate (genetic and ontogenetic) and ultimate (adaptive value and evolutionary origins) perspective, and integrating these perspectives can provide further insights. Over the last few decades we have made grea...

Convergent evolution provides a rare, natural experiment with which to test the predictability of adaptation at the molecular level. Little is known about the molecular basis of convergence over macro-evolutionary timescales. Here we use a combination of positional cloning, population genomic resequencing, association mapping and developmental data...