Gaze Following in Ungulates: Domesticated and Non-domesticated Species Follow the Gaze of Both Humans and Conspecifics in an Experimental Context

Gaze following is the ability to use others’ gaze to obtain information about the environment (e.g., food location, predators, and social interactions). As such, it may be highly adaptive in a variety of socio-ecological contexts, and thus be widespread across animal taxa. To date, gaze following has been mostly studied in primates, and partially in birds, but little is known on the gaze following abilities of other taxa and, especially, on the evolutionary pressures that led to their emergence. In this study, we used an experimental approach to test gaze following skills in a still understudied taxon, ungulates. Across four species (i.e., domestic goats and lamas, and non-domestic guanacos and mouflons), we assessed the individual ability to spontaneously follow the gaze of both conspecifics and human experimenters in different conditions. In line with our predictions, species followed the model’s gaze both with human and conspecific models, but more likely with the latter. Except for guanacos, all species showed gaze following significantly more in the experimental conditions (than in the control ones). Despite the relative low number of study subjects, our study provides the first experimental evidence of gaze following skills in non-domesticated ungulates, and contributes to understanding how gaze following skills are distributed in another taxon—an essential endeavor to identify the evolutionary pressures leading to the emergence of gaze following skills across taxa.

Media Informasi Website pada Wisata Kuliner Panganan Khas Mandar

Limited information on typical Mandar culinary in Majene Regency, such as types of food, location of food, operating hours, and transportation are references to provide complete information to tourists. Information about typical Mandar food requires the role of technology in it, considering that it plays a very important role in helping tourists or local people to find information about Mandar specialties, it is requires a media capable of providing information about the address of the place to eat, the type of food served, the hours of operation, and transportation used. The purpose of this research is to design website information media on Mandar culinery touris in Majene regency that can help tourist or local communities. Based on a series of research it can be conclude that the website information media on typical Mandar culinary tours in Majene Regency can make it easy for tourist or local people to get information about the Mandar culinary tours and decide which restaurant wiil they choice.

Horses’ Senses Involvement in Food Location and Selection

Senses are an important part of the interaction with the environment. Previous studies has been established that horses use smell and taste in the selection of their food. The involvement of sight in the selection process has not been clarified up to this study. Here, we investigate the involvement of senses in the selection process of food, also the proportion in which, each senses are involved and we evaluate the horses preferences for different colors. Two experiments have been designed and carried out with two racing horses The results obtained have demonstrated that the sight is the main sense in the location of the food, followed by the sense of olfactory organ involved in selecting plants ingested and the sense of taste which contributes less to the selection. There has also been identified a preference of the envolved horses for the pink color used in this experiment.

Metode Simple Additive Weighting Dalam Sistem Pendukung Keputusan Pemilihan Tempat Kuliner Di Kabupaten Purwakarta

Tourism in Purwakarta Regency has an impact on culinary development. Many culinary places in Purwakarta can make people sometimes confused to determine which appropriate place for eating. Lack of information on available locations is a problem for tourists who want to enjoy the satisfaction of culinary tourists. Some criteria can be chosen, namely: price, type of food, location or cleanliness, and facilities. Therefore,a support system was proposed using a simple Additive Weighting method (SAW) and the Waterfall development method. This system provides an appropriate a decision system in choosing the culinary place. Keywords: Simple Additive Weighting, Decision Support System, Waterfall Abstrak Meningkatnya jumlah wisatawan di Kabupaten Purwakarta memberikan dampak terhadap perkembangan usaha kuliner. Banyaknya lokasi penjualan kuliner yang ada di Purwakarta membuat wisatawan bingung untuk menentukan tempat makan mana yang sesuai dengan keinginan mereka. Kurangnya informasi terhadap lokasi yang tersedia menjadi masalah bagi wisatawan yang ingin menikmati berwisata kuliner. Beberapa kriteria dapat menjadi pilihan dalam wisata kuliner antara lain, harga, jenis makanan, lokasi atau kebersihan, dan fasilitas Sehubungan dengan wisatawan yang mengalami kesulitan dalam menentukan tempat kuliner di Purwakarta, maka penulis akan membuat sistem pendukung keputusan dengan metode Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) dengan metode pengembangan Waterfall. Sistem ini dapat membantu memberikan alternatif keputusan dalam menentukan tempat kuliner di Purwakarta mengacu kepada kriteria-kriteria pengambilan keputusan tersebut. Kata kunci: Simple Additive Weighting, Sistem Pendukung Keputusan, Waterfall,

Encoding of an engram for food location by satiety-promoting Drd2 hippocampal neurons

SUMMARYAssociative learning guides feeding behavior in mammals in part by using cues that link location in space to food availability. However, the elements of the top-down circuitry encoding the memory of the location of food is largely unknown, as are the high-order processes that control satiety. Here we report that hippocampal dopamine 2 receptor (D2R) neurons are specifically activated by food and that modulation of their activity reduce food intake in mice. We also found that activation of these neurons interferes with the valence of food and the acquisition of a spatial memory linking food to a location via projections from the hippocampus to the lateral septum. Finally, we showed that inputs from lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) to the hippocampus can also drive satiety via activation of D2R cells. These data describe a previously unidentified function for hippocampal D2R cells to regulate feeding behavior and identifies a LEC->Hippocampus->Septal high-order circuit that encodes the memory of food location.

Do pet dogs ( Canis familiaris ) follow ostensive and non-ostensive human gaze to distant space and to objects?

Dogs are renowned for being skilful at using human-given communicative cues such as pointing. Results are contradictory, however, when it comes to dogs' following human gaze, probably due to methodological discrepancies. Here we investigated whether dogs follow human gaze to one of two food locations better than into distant space even after comparable pre-training. In Experiments 1 and 2, the gazing direction of dogs was recorded in a gaze-following into distant space and in an object-choice task where no choice was allowed, in order to allow a direct comparison between tasks, varying the ostensive nature of the gazes. We found that dogs only followed repeated ostensive human gaze into distant space, whereas they followed all gaze cues in the object-choice task. Dogs followed human gaze better in the object-choice task than when there was no obvious target to look at. In Experiment 3, dogs were tested in another object-choice task and were allowed to approach a container. Ostensive cues facilitated the dogs’ following gaze with gaze as well as their choices: we found that dogs in the ostensive group chose the indicated container at chance level, whereas they avoided this container in the non-ostensive group. We propose that dogs may perceive the object-choice task as a competition over food and may interpret non-ostensive gaze as an intentional cue that indicates the experimenter's interest in the food location she has looked at. Whether ostensive cues simply mitigate the competitive perception of this situation or they alter how dogs interpret communicative gaze needs further investigation. Our findings also show that following gaze with one's gaze and actually choosing one of the two containers in an object-choice task need to be considered as different variables. The present study clarifies a number of questions related to gaze-following in dogs and adds to a growing body of evidence showing that human ostensive cues can strongly modify dog behaviour.

Active sensing associated with spatial learning reveals memory-based attention in an electric fish

Active sensing behaviors reveal what an animal is attending to and how it changes with learning. Gymnotus sp., a gymnotiform weakly electric fish, generates an electric organ discharge (EOD) as discrete pulses to actively sense its surroundings. We monitored freely behaving gymnotid fish in a large dark “maze” and extracted their trajectories and EOD pulse pattern and rate while they learned to find food with electrically detectable landmarks as cues. After training, they more rapidly found food using shorter, more stereotyped trajectories and spent more time near the food location. We observed three forms of active sensing: sustained high EOD rates per unit distance (sampling density), transient large increases in EOD rate (E-scans) and stereotyped scanning movements (B-scans) were initially strong at landmarks and food, but, after learning, intensified only at the food location. During probe (no food) trials, after learning, the fish's search area and intense active sampling was still centered on the missing food location, but now also increased near landmarks. We hypothesize that active sensing is a behavioral manifestation of attention and essential for spatial learning; the fish use spatial memory of landmarks and path integration to reach the expected food location and confine their attention to this region.

Do chimpanzees and orangutans use communication in a cooperative task?

Previous experimental studies show that captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo abelii) cooperate with conspecifics but communication does not seem to play a crucial role. We presented a coordination task in which pairs of conspecifics had to communicate to succeed. Participants faced each other from opposite sides of an apparatus playing either a communicator or an operator role. At the beginning of each trial, the communicator was provided with a tool that could only be used from the operator’s side. If the operator inserted the tool into the baited tube the apparatus delivered food for both apes. Successful cooperation required that the communicator pass the tool to the operator and indicate the location of the baited tube so that the operator could insert it into the baited tube. In the experimental condition, only the communicator could see which one of four tubes was baited, while in the control condition both individuals had visual access to the baited tube. Data collection is currently ongoing. Participants are chimpanzees (1 male, 5 females; mean age= 22 years) and orangutans (2 males, 5 females; mean age= 18 years) housed at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig (Germany). So far, four dyads of chimpanzees have cooperated to solve the task. Preliminary results indicate that the communicator typically transfers the tool near the location of the food. In the experimental condition, success rate varies from 25% to 81% (compared to 94-100% in the control condition). Communicators pass the tool, touch or point at the food location, whereas operators request the tool, and both use attention getters aimed at their partners. We are currently analyzing whether these behaviors are independent of the operator’s visual access to the baited location.