The Genesis of Animal Play
Author: Gordon M. Burghardt
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 532
ISBN-13: 0262025434
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA scientist examines the origins and evolutionary significance of play in humans and animals.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Play
Author: Peter K. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-11-15
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 1108135501
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPlay takes up much of the time budget of young children, and many animals, but its importance in development remains contested. This comprehensive collection brings together multidisciplinary and developmental perspectives on the forms and functions of play in animals, children in different societies, and through the lifespan. The Cambridge Handbook of Play covers the evolution of play in animals, especially mammals; the development of play from infancy through childhood and into adulthood; historical and anthropological perspectives on play; theories and methodologies; the role of play in children's learning; play in special groups such as children with impairments, or suffering political violence; and the practical applications of playwork and play therapy. Written by an international team of scholars from diverse disciplines such as psychology, education, neuroscience, sociology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, this essential reference presents the current state of the field in play research.
Animal Tool Behavior
Author: Robert W. Shumaker
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2011-05-02
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 1421401282
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen published in 1980, Benjamin B. Beck’s Animal Tool Behavior was the first volume to catalog and analyze the complete literature on tool use and manufacture in non-human animals. Beck showed that animals—from insects to primates—employed different types of tools to solve numerous problems. His work inspired and energized legions of researchers to study the use of tools by a wide variety of species. In this revised and updated edition of the landmark publication, Robert W. Shumaker and Kristina R. Walkup join Beck to reveal the current state of knowledge regarding animal tool behavior. Through a comprehensive synthesis of the studies produced through 2010, the authors provide an updated and exact definition of tool use, identify new modes of use that have emerged in the literature, examine all forms of tool manufacture, and address common myths about non-human tool use. Specific examples involving invertebrates, birds, fish, and mammals describe the differing levels of sophistication of tool use exhibited by animals.
Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation
Author: Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-07-11
Total Pages: 167
ISBN-13: 1107015138
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamines the role of playfulness in animal and human development, highlighting its links to creativity and, in turn, to innovation.
The Ambiguity of Play
Author: Brian Sutton-Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-06-30
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 0674044185
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--The ancient discourses of fate, power, communal identity, and frivolity and the modern discourses of progress, the imaginary, and the self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse's "objective" theory
The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles
Author: J. Sean Doody
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2021-06
Total Pages: 437
ISBN-13: 1421440679
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRevealing the secrets of reptilian social relationships through original quantitative research, field studies, laboratory experiments, and careful analysis of the literature, The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles elevates these fascinating animals to key players in the science of behavioral ecology.
Cephalopod Cognition
Author: Anne-Sophie Darmaillacq
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-07-10
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 1107015561
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on comparative cognition in cephalopods, this book illuminates the wide range of mental function in this often overlooked group.
Inside the Animal Mind
Author: George Page
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2001-08-02
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 0767909313
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the bestselling tradition of When Elephants Weep and Dogs Don't Lie About Love, Inside the Animal Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of the nature and depth of animal intelligence. While in the past scientists have refused to acknowledge that animals have anything like human intelligence, a growing body of research reveals otherwise. We’ve discovered ants that use leaves as tools to cross bodies of water, woodpecker finches that hold twigs in their beaks to dig for grubs, and bonobo apes that can use sticks to knock down fruit or pole-vault over water. Not only do animals use tools–some also display an ability to learn and problem-solve. Based on the latest scientific and anecdotal evidence culled from animal experts in the labs and the field, Inside the Animal Mind is an engrossing look at animal intelligence, cognitive ability, problem solving, and emotion. George Page, originator and host of the long-running PBS series Nature, offers us an informed, entertaining, and humanistic investigation of the minds of predators and scavengers, birds and primates, rodents and other species. Illustrated with twenty-four black-and-white photographs, the book is the companion to the three-part, hour-long show of the same name, hosted by Page.
The Accommodated Animal
Author: Laurie Shannon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-01-02
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0226924181
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
The Play of Animals
Author: Karl Groos
Publisher:
Published: 1898
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"In this volume Professor Groos makes a contribution to three distinct but cognate departments of inquiry: philosophical biology, animal psychology, and the genetic study of art. The world of play, to which art belongs, stands in most important and interesting contrast with the stern realities of life; yet there are few scientific works in the field of human play, and none at all in that of animal play--a fact to be accounted for, probably, by the inherent difficulties of the subject, both objective and subjective. The animal psychologist must harbour in his breast not only two souls, but more; he must unite with a thorough training in physiology, psychology, and biology the experience of a traveller, the practical knowledge of the director of a zoological garden, and the outdoor lore of a forester. And even then he could not round up his labours satisfactorily unless he were familiar with the trend of modern aesthetics. Groos holds play to be an instinct developed by natural selection, and to be on a level with the other instincts which are developed for their utility. Its utility is, in the main, twofold: First, it enables the young animal to exercise himself beforehand in the strenuous and necessary functions of its life and so to be ready for their onset; and, second, it enables the animal by a general instinct to do many things in a playful way, and so to learn for itself much that would otherwise have to be inherited in the form of special instincts; this puts a premium on intelligence, which thus comes to replace instinct"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
