Studying Animal Languages Without Translation: An Insight from Ants
Studying Animal Languages Without Translation: An Insight from Ants

Author: Zhanna Reznikova

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 3319449184

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The Author of this new volume on ant communication demonstrates that information theory is a valuable tool for studying the natural communication of animals. To do so, she pursues a fundamentally new approach to studying animal communication and “linguistic” capacities on the basis of measuring the rate of information transmission and the complexity of transmitted messages. Animals’ communication systems and cognitive abilities have long-since been a topic of particular interest to biologists, psychologists, linguists, and many others, including researchers in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The main difficulties in the analysis of animal language have to date been predominantly methodological in nature. Addressing this perennial problem, the elaborated experimental paradigm presented here has been applied to ants, and can be extended to other social species of animals that have the need to memorize and relay complex “messages”. Accordingly, the method opens exciting new dimensions in the study of natural communications in the wild.

Field and Laboratory Methods in Animal Cognition
Field and Laboratory Methods in Animal Cognition

Author: Nereida Bueno-Guerra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1108355897

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Would you ask a honeybee to point at a screen and recognise a facial expression? Or ask an elephant to climb a tree? While humans and non-human species may inhabit the same world, it's likely that our perceptual worlds differ significantly. Emphasising Uexküll's concept of 'umwelt', this volume offers practical advice on how animal cognition can be successfully tested while avoiding anthropomorphic conclusions. The chapters describe the capabilities of a range of animals - from ants, to lizards to chimpanzees - revealing how to successfully investigate animal cognition across a variety of taxa. The book features contributions from leading cognition researchers, each offering a series of examples and practical tips drawn from their own experience. Together, the authors synthesise information on current field and laboratory methods, providing researchers and graduate students with methodological advice on how to formulate research questions, design experiments and adapt studies to different taxa.

Dating Beowulf
Dating Beowulf

Author: Daniel C. Remein

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-12-20

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1526136449

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval studies, Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice-versa, offering a riposte to antifeminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, literary theorists, students of Old English literature and medieval scholars alike. To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.

Chasing Doctor Dolittle
Chasing Doctor Dolittle

Author: C. N. Slobodchikoff

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 031261179X

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Discusses how animals are capable of interacting intelligently through vocal and physical methods, drawing on work with prairie dogs to present evidence of animal communication methods and how they can be imitated by human researchers.

Animal Intelligence
Animal Intelligence

Author: Zhanna Reznikova

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-08-16

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9780521825047

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From ants to whales, the lives of animals are filled with challenges that demand minute-by-minute decisions: to fight or flee, dominate or obey, take-off, share, eat, spit out or court. Learning develops adaptive tuning to a changeable environment, while intelligence helps animals use their learned experiences in new situations. Using examples from field to laboratory, Animal Intelligence pools resources from ethology, behavioural ecology and comparative psychology to help the reader enter the world of wild intelligence through the analysis of adventures, of ideas and methods, rather than through theoretic modelling. It reminds us that there is a world of intellectual biodiversity out there, providing a multi-faceted panorama of animal intelligence.