A Comparison of Mate Preferences in Asexual and Allosexual Adults.

Asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction. Sexual attraction is likely associated with preferences for certain characteristics in romantic partners, such as physical attractiveness. Preferred partner characteristics can be influenced by an individual's sexual orientation, gender, and age. Allosexual (N = 239; male = 48, female = 181, other = 4; Age M = 20.48 years) and asexual participants (N = 149; male = 36, female = 88, other = 23; Age M = 25.54 years) recruited from a pool of psychology students and through online asexual communities were presented with a survey in which a total of 388 participants rated 13 characteristics according to how desirable they were in a potential long-term romantic partner. Characteristics that are related to physical attractiveness were predicted to be rated lower by asexual participants than by allosexual participants. Asexual participants rated the desire to have children as being less desirable in a romantic partner than allosexual participants did. However, preferences for other traits, such as exciting personality, creative and artistic, and religious, were dependent on interactions of gender and attraction to men or women. Because asexual individuals report generally lower levels of sexual attraction, it will be important for future research to consider romantic attraction as a more nuanced measure than sexual orientation alone when considering sex differences in asexual and allosexual populations.

Prosocial or photo preferences? Gorillas' prosocial choices using a touchscreen.

Three male Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) were given the opportunity to select their own or conspecific photos on a touchscreen to indicate whether they wished the experimenter to deliver a food reward only to them or to them and the selected conspecific(s). This is only the second symbolic test of prosocial preferences with apes using a touchscreen, and the first with gorillas. The use of self and other photographs as symbols of prosocial choices was intuitive while controlling for the distraction of visible food rewards, and allowing for tests of transfer to further validate apparent prosocial intentions. Gorillas rapidly learned to avoid selecting a photograph of an empty enclosure that resulted in no rewards for any of the gorillas and transferred this learning to a novel photograph. The gorillas did not behave in a consistently self-interested or prosocial manner but they clearly rejected the opportunity to choose spitefully. Their preferences for certain photographs did not necessarily reflect a preference to be prosocial toward that particular individual because these preferences did not transfer to novel photographs of the same individuals. The results call into question whether gorillas recognize themselves and conspecifics in photographs but cannot conclusively speak to whether gorillas have prosocial preferences. They do stress the importance of carefully probing alternative explanations when inferring intentions from observable behaviors.

"Monkeying around" together facilitates problem solving.

Sehner et al. (PNAS Nexus, 2022, 1-14) report that groups of common marmosets solve problems more frequently and faster than individuals working alone. This result is partially explained by greater persistence at the task in the group context and may have important implications for the evolution of cognition and culture.

Does narcissus prefer to be alone? Narcissistic personality features and the preference for solitude.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the associations that narcissistic personality traits had with the preference for solitude. BACKGROUND: Preference for solitude may be impacted by various characteristics. Narcissism may be one such characteristic given its association with specific motivations for engagement with other individuals (e.g., status attainment). METHOD: We examined whether the associations that narcissism had with the preference for solitude were moderated by perceived attainment of status or instability of status. RESULTS: Across three studies (N = 627/479/675), extraverted narcissism had the expected aversion to solitude. Antagonistic narcissism and neurotic narcissism did not have consistent associations with the preference for solitude across these studies, nor did the perceived attainment of status consistently moderate the links between narcissistic personality features and the preference for solitude. However, perceived instability of status moderated the associations that extraverted narcissism and antagonistic narcissism had with the preference for solitude. More specifically, the more stable status was perceived to be, the greater the aversion to solitude for those high in extraverted narcissism and the greater the preference for solitude for those high in antagonistic narcissism. CONCLUSIONS: This pattern of results suggests that the motivations underlying preferences for solitude differ depending on particular narcissistic traits that predict whether one is more concerned with maintaining, gaining, or losing status. These results build upon what is known about the connections that narcissism has with the preference for solitude.

What's not to like about Likert? Developing a nonverbal animal preference scale (NAPS).

Rating scales, such as Likert scales, are incredibly flexible and intuitive tools for measuring individuals' rating of agreement with or relative preference for many types of stimuli. For humans, this typically involves ratings of agreement between end points representing distinct attitudes or beliefs; For example, strongly disagree to strongly agree. Nonverbal versions of Likert scales have also been presented to children, allowing them to indicate their degree of preference, pain, or happiness. However, before the current study, no known efforts had been made to develop a nonverbal rating scale for use with nonhuman animals. Such a scale would be a useful welfare tool, allowing nonverbal individuals to indicate not just relative preferences between pairs of items but their degree of liking for individual items. I present an outline of the steps taken to create such a scale for use with three zoo-housed gorillas. Two gorillas succeeded in associating preferred and less preferred foods with different response buttons but none of the gorillas were able to effectively use the neutral response button. It is possible that limits in gorillas' capacity for conditional discriminations and/or conceptualization of constructs as abstract as "liking" impeded training. These data are relevant for understanding gorilla cognition and can inform continued efforts to create a tool for nonhumans to communicate their preferences to human caregivers in a more nuanced way than is currently possible.

Bearing fruit: Piloting a novel judgment bias task in an American black bear.

Judgment bias tasks can reveal changes in affect in animals as a function of environmental manipulations such as provision of enrichment. We assessed affect in an American black bear across seasonal changes in availability of a mulberry bush. We used a novel judgment bias task in which the background color of a touchscreen signaled whether the left or right positioned stimulus was correct. The bear learned the conditional rule in which the correct action for the white background (choose left) resulted in three pieces of food and the correct action for the black background (choose right) resulted in one piece of food. On probe trials involving intermediate gray backgrounds, left side responses indicated optimism and right side responses indicated pessimism. Tests took place at the beginning, middle, and end of mulberry season and again nearing the end of the summer and early fall before hibernation. The bear showed the most optimistic responses during the phase involving increased opportunities for foraging on mulberry. A follow-up experiment confirmed that the bear preferred three food items over one food item, suggesting the quantity-based discrimination was in fact salient to this bear. This is the first evidence for conditional discrimination learning in a black bear, validating the task to assess changes in affect.

Young Children's Theory of Mind Predicts More Sharing With Friends Over Time.

Children (predominantly white and middle class) between 3 and 6 years (M = 55.12 months, N = 145 at Time 1, N = 102 at Time 2) participated in the prosocial choice test at two time points approximately 10 months apart. Children could share with strangers, close friends, nonfriends, and in a control, no recipient condition. Children shared more rewards with friends over time. Age interacted with recipient type such that older children had a higher probability of prosocial allocations toward friends and strangers compared to younger children. Theory of mind (ToM) predicted more prosocial allocations to friends over time, and the youngest children with higher ToM scores showed the largest increase in sharing with friends over time.

Sticks and stones: Associative learning alone?

Gruber et al. (Current Biology, 29, 686-692, 2019) report that New Caledonian crows engage in mental representation to solve a problem involving a tool. Although the crows' success is impressive, an associative account of their behavior calls into question the extent to which the data reflect representation of future states.

A fish eye view of the mirror test.

Reactions to a recent study suggesting that cleaner wrasse can pass the mirror self-recognition test (Kohda et al. in PLOS Biology, 17(2), e3000021, 2019) reveal more about scientists' biases than about self-awareness. Scientists should base conclusions about species' abilities based on the corpus of data on that species rather than on a single test or preconceived expectations based on phylogeny alone.

Spatial representation of magnitude in humans (Homo sapiens), Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), and American black bears (Ursus americanus).

The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect is the tendency for humans to respond faster to relatively larger numbers on the left or right (or with the left or right hand) and faster to relatively smaller numbers on the other side. This effect seems to occur due to a spatial representation of magnitude either in occurrence with a number line (wherein participants respond to relatively larger numbers faster on the right), other representations such as clock faces (responses are reversed from number lines), or culturally specific reading directions, begging the question as to whether the effect may be limited to humans. Given that a SNARC effect has emerged via a quantity judgement task in Western lowland gorillas and orangutans (Gazes et al., Cog 168:312-319, 2017), we examined patterns of response on a quantity discrimination task in American black bears, Western lowland gorillas, and humans for evidence of a SNARC effect. We found limited evidence for SNARC effect in American black bears and Western lowland gorillas. Furthermore, humans were inconsistent in direction and strength of effects, emphasizing the importance of standardizing methodology and analyses when comparing SNARC effects between species. These data reveal the importance of collecting data with humans in analogous procedures when testing nonhumans for effects assumed to bepresent in humans.

Social tolerance in not-so-social pumas.

Elbroch, Levy, Lubell, Quigley, and Caragiulo (2017, Science Advances, 3, e170218) used GPS and motion-activated camera technology to track and rate the interactions between solitary wild pumas. They found that tolerance at feeding sites was not predicted by kinship but, rather, indicated the ability to engage in direct reciprocity, challenging previous assumptions about social cognition in solitary species.

Are chimpanzees "stuck" on their "selves" in video?

Hirata, Fuwa, and Myowa (Royal Society Open Science, 4; 170370, 2017) extended to chimpanzee subjects a paradigm that had been developed by Povinelli and colleagues (Povinelli, Landau, Child Development, 67; 1540-1554, 1996; Perilloux, Povinelli & Simon, Developmental Psychology, 34, 188-194, 1998) to demonstrate the concept of self-continuity in young children. However, Hirata and colleagues lacked critical controls that would have allowed the conclusion that some of their chimpanzees recognized themselves in the time-delayed videos.

Behavioral and hormonal responses to the availability of forage material in Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla).

We investigated how forage material affects indicators of welfare in three male Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at the Detroit Zoo. In addition to their maintenance diet and enrichment foods, the gorillas generally received forage material four times a week. From this baseline, we systematically manipulated how much forage material the group received on a weekly basis, with either daily or bi (twice)-weekly presentation of browse (mulberry, Morus sp.) or alfalfa hay. We collected behavioral data (60 hr per gorilla) and measured fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (FGM). Mixed models indicated that the presence of forage material significantly increased time feeding (F2,351 = 9.58, p < 0.001), and decreased rates of noncontact aggression (F2,351 = 3.69, p = 0.03), and regurgitation and reingestion (F2,353 = 4.70, p = 0.01). Regurgitation and reingestion were never observed during the condition when forage material was provided daily. When forage material was provided, time spent feeding was similar across gorillas, compared to a disproportionately greater amount of time spent feeding by the dominant individual when forage material was absent. Providing forage material in addition to the regular diet likely created more opportunities for equitable feeding for the subordinate gorillas. FGM concentrations did not vary based on the presence or type of forage material available and, instead, likely reflected group social dynamics. In general, alfalfa and mulberry had similar impacts on behavior, indicating that alfalfa can be an adequate behavioral substitute during times when browse is less readily available for gorillas housed in seasonally variable climates.

Man's other best friend: domestic cats (F. silvestris catus) and their discrimination of human emotion cues.

The ability of domestic dogs (C. lupus famaliaris) to follow and attend to human emotion expressions is well documented. It is unknown whether domestic cats (F. silvestris catus) possess similar abilities. Because cats belong to the same order (Carnivora), but did not evolve to live in complex social groups, research with them enables us to tease apart the influence of social structure versus domestication processes on the capacity to recognize human communicative cues, such as emotions. Two experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which domestic cats discriminate between human emotion cues. The first experiment presented cats with facial and postural cues of happiness and anger from both an unfamiliar experimenter and their familiar owner in the absence of vocal cues. The second experiment presented cats with vocal cues of human emotion through a positively or negatively charged conversation between an experimenter and owner. Domestic cats were only modestly sensitive to emotion, particularly when displayed by their owner, suggesting that a history of human interaction alone may not be sufficient to shape such abilities in domestic cats.

Picture object recognition in an American black bear (Ursus americanus).

Many animals have been tested for conceptual discriminations using two-dimensional images as stimuli, and many of these species appear to transfer knowledge from 2D images to analogous real life objects. We tested an American black bear for picture-object recognition using a two alternative forced choice task. She was presented with four unique sets of objects and corresponding pictures. The bear showed generalization from both objects to pictures and pictures to objects; however, her transfer was superior when transferring from real objects to pictures, suggesting that bears can recognize visual features from real objects within photographic images during discriminations.

Bigger brains may make better problem-solving carnivores.

Benson-Amram, Dantzer, Stricker, Swanson, & Holekamp's (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 25321-25376, 2016) recent demonstration that larger-brained carnivores were more successful in a single problem-solving task, relative to smaller-brained carnivores, irrespective of social complexity, poses a challenge to proponents of the social intelligence hypothesis (Humphrey, 1976) and provides some support for the idea that larger relative brain sizes have evolved to support greater problem-solving abilities. However, an important question, neglected by the authors, is the extent to which foraging ecology, rather than social environment, more accurately predicts problem solving, and whether this relationship would be observed in noncarnivore, noncaptive animals across a range of tasks.

Apes have eyes to the future.

Kano and Hirata (Current Biology, 25, 2513-2517, 2015) recently showed that apes process object and location information and anticipate the repeated presentation of such events in short film clips. Their methodology, using eyetracking, can provide a foundation for further explications of long-term prospective and episodic memory in nonverbal species.

Adults' responsiveness to children's facial expressions.

We investigated the effect of young children's (hereafter children's) facial expressions on adult responsiveness. In Study 1, 131 undergraduate students from a midsized university in the midwestern United States rated children's images and videos with smiling, crying, or neutral expressions on cuteness, likelihood to adopt, and participants' experienced distress. Looking times at images and videos along with perception of cuteness, likelihood to adopt, and experienced distress using 10-point Likert scales were measured. Videos of smiling children were rated as cuter and more likely to be adopted and were viewed for longer times compared with videos of crying children, which evoked more distress. In Study 2, we recorded responses from 101 of the same participants in an online survey measuring gender role identity, empathy, and perspective taking. Higher levels of femininity (as measured by Bem's Sex Role Inventory) predicted higher "likely to adopt" ratings for crying images. These findings indicate that adult perception of children and motivation to nurture are affected by both children's facial expressions and adult characteristics and build on existing literature to demonstrate that children may use expressions to manipulate the motivations of even non-kin adults to direct attention toward and perhaps nurture young children.

Quantity matching by an orangutan (Pongo abelii).

An adult male orangutan (Pongo abelii) was presented with a series of delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) tasks in which he was to match images based on (a) the number of individual animals depicted in the photograph (from 1 to 4), (b) the number of abstract shapes presented in the stimulus (from 1 to 4), or (c) the number of dots presented in the stimulus (from 1 to 4, 4-7, or 7-10). The spatial arrangement of the dots and the background color of the stimuli varied, and the size of the dots was manipulated to control for overall ratio of foreground to background. The subject's performance was not affected by these perceptual features, but was affected by the absolute difference and ratio between number of elements in the comparison stimuli. However, the relationship between these variables and his performance was not always linear as predicted by the analog magnitude model. In addition, the subject showed a high degree of transfer to novel numerosities up to ten, indicating that orangutans are capable of estimating quantity for a greater number of items than can presumably be subtilized by humans.