Ferrets (Mustela furo) Are Aware of Their Dimensions.

Self-awareness is a complex phenomenon expressed as the ability of an individual to separate "self-entity" from "other entity". One of its earliest evolutionary components is body size awareness, namely, the ability to consider the boundaries of one's own body as factors influencing interaction with surrounding objects. For ferrets, Mustela furo, the task requiring the penetration of various holes is ecologically relevant. We designed an experimental study in which the ferrets were supposed to select one opening out of three to get the bait. The first experiment was aimed at studying whether ferrets would prefer the holes basing on the hole size. In the second experiment, we tested the ferrets' ability to select a single passable hole on the first try while the impassable ones were larger in area. Results from the first experiment show that when choosing from the three passable openings, the animals preferred the shortest path to the bait and ignored the size of the holes. In the second experiment, all tested ferrets preferred to penetrate the passable opening on the first attempt, even though the areas of the two impenetrable ones were larger. We argue that these data indicate that ferrets are aware of their own body size.

Hooded Crows (Corvus cornix) May Be Aware of Their Own Body Size.

Body-awareness is one of the manifestations of self-awareness, expressed in the ability of people and animals to represent their own body physical properties. Relatively little work has been devoted to this phenomenon in comparison with the studies of the ability of self-recognition in the mirror, and most studies have been conducted on mammals and human infants. Crows are known to be "clever" birds, so we investigated whether hooded crows (Corvus cornix) may be aware of their own body size. We set up an experimental design in which the crows had to pass through one of three openings to reach the bait. In the first experiment, we studied whether crows prefer a larger hole if all the three are suitable for passage, and what other predictors influence their choice. In the second experiment, we assessed the ability of the crows to select a single passable hole out of three on the first attempt, even though the area of the former was smaller than that of the other two. The results of the first experiment suggest that when choosing among three passable holes, crows prefer those holes that require less effort from them, e.g., they do not need to crouch or make other additional movements. In the second experiment, three of the five crows reliably more often chose a single passable hole on the first try, despite its smaller size. We believe that these results suggest that hooded crows may be aware of their own body size.

Snakes Elaphe Radiata May Acquire Awareness of Their Body Limits When Trying to Hide in a Shelter.

Body awareness was studied experimentally in the rat snakes Elaphe radiata. The experimental design required that the snakes take into account the limits of their bodies when choosing a suitable hole for penetration into the shelter. The experimental setup consisted of two compartments, a launch chamber and a shelter, separated by a partition with openings of different diameters. The diameters of the holes and/or their position in the partition were changeable. The subjects were 20 snakes divided into two groups, for one of which only the locations of the holes varied; for another, both the location of the holes and the limits of the body varied. The body was increased by feeding the snakes. In the course of the first three experimental series the snakes formed the skill of taking into account the body limits, which manifested in the reduced number of unsuccessful attempts to select holes too small for their bodies. During the fourth series, with the locations of holes randomized for each trial, the snakes demonstrated behavioral flexibility, significantly more often penetrating into the shelter from the first attempt irrespectively of the location of the suitable hole. We argue that these results demonstrate the body-awareness in snakes.

Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame.

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies.

Becoming valuable to fellow group members so that one would attract assistance in times of need is a major adaptive problem. To solve it, the individual needs a predictive map of the degree to which others value different acts so that, in choosing how to act, the payoff arising from others' valuation of a potential action (e.g., showing bandmates that one is a skilled forager by pursuing a hard-to-acquire prey item) can be added to the direct payoff of the action (e.g., gaining the nutrients of the prey captured). The pride system seems to incorporate all of the elements necessary to solve this adaptive problem. Importantly, data from western(-ized), educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies indicate close quantitative correspondences between pride and the valuations of audiences. Do those results generalize beyond industrial mass societies? To find out, we conducted an experiment among 567 participants in 10 small-scale societies scattered across Central and South America, Africa, and Asia: (i) Bosawás Reserve, Nicaragua; (ii) Cotopaxi, Ecuador; (iii) Drâa-Tafilalet, Morocco; (iv) Enugu, Nigeria; (v) Le Morne, Mauritius; (vi) La Gaulette, Mauritius; (vii) Tuva, Russia; (viii) Shaanxi and Henan, China; (ix) farming communities in Japan; and (x) fishing communities in Japan. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, pride in each community closely tracked the valuation of audiences locally (mean r = +0.66) and even across communities (mean r = +0.29). This suggests that the pride system not only develops the same functional architecture everywhere but also operates with a substantial degree of universality in its content.