Similar to other fields, environmental education has begun to embrace the significance of nonhuman animals. This essay examines developments in the natural sciences, particularly in the field of cognitive ethology, that focus on the concept of empathy as a paradigm for conceptualizing human/nonhuman animal relationships. Drawing on my own…

Oscar Riddle, born in Indiana in 1877, was an ardent evolutionist and a key player in the founding of the National Association of Biology Teachers in 1938. He studied heredity and behavior in domestic pigeons and doves with Charles O. Whitman of the University of Chicago, received his Ph.D. in zoology in 1907, and in 1912 began a long career at…

In this paper we discuss the development and running of a residential animal behaviour field trip. The trip has a number of elements that challenge and develop the students. First, this trip is open to students at levels two, three and M. This allows us to engineer a certain amount of peer assisted learning. Second, the students live together and…

Charles Darwin made numerous seminal contributions to the study of animal behavior over his long career. This essay places these contributions in the context of Darwin's life, showing his long-standing interest in psychological and behavioral issues encompassing all species, including humans. Ten areas are highlighted: natural history;…

Social psychological investigations of hierarchy formation have been almost entirely confined to the case of task-oriented groups and hence have produced theories that turn on the existence of such a task. But other forms of vertical hierarchy may emerge in non-task groups. One form, orderings of dominance, has been studied among animals using…

In response to a direct request from science teachers, researchers initiated a pilot experience on animal orientation and navigation, which was delivered to 61 13-year-old students in Florence, Italy. The aim was to explain the approach to ethology and to link animal navigation with geography, focusing on species crossing the Italian territory.…

The purpose of the present experiment was to determine whether repeated cocaine exposure differentially affects sucrose-reinforced operant responding in rats raised in an enriched condition (EC) or an isolated condition (IC). Specifically, the performance of EC and IC rats pressing a lever for sucrose under a high fixed-ratio schedule (FR 30)…

For teachers, a common difficulty when introducing scientific thinking is finding ways to engage the participation of the students. Because most scientific problems require at least some specialized knowledge to formulate and solve, it can be hard to go beyond merely discussing the steps of the scientific method and illustrating them with the…

We investigated the associations between Boston naming and the animal fluency tests and cortical atrophy in 19 probable AD and 5 multiple domain amnestic mild cognitive impairment patients who later converted to AD. We applied a surface-based computational anatomy technique to MRI scans of the brain and then used linear regression models to detect…

Rats in a Pavlovian situation were trained under three different reward schedules, at either a 30 s or a 90 s intertrial interval (ITI): Consistent reward (C), 50% irregular reward (I), and single alternation of reward and nonrewarded trials (SA). Activity was recorded to the conditioned stimulus (CS) and in all 10 s bins in each ITI except the…

Rats were given differential exposure to three distinct and novel foods. One of these foods was exposed for 7 days; another for 2 days, and the last was not exposed. Next, half of the rats received six daily sessions in which a compound of the three flavors was followed by opportunities to run in wheels. The other rats received the food compound…

Although researchers are exploring animals' capacity for monitoring their states of uncertainty, the use of some paradigms allows the criticism that animals map avoidance responses to error-causing stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored but because of feedback signals and stimulus aversion. The authors addressed this criticism with an…

It is often said that a dog is a best friend. In fact, after cattle, dogs are the oldest domesticated animals. Dogs have lived with humans for over 10,000 years and have been selectively bred for various types of domestication. Domesticated dogs have performed many roles in society throughout history-rescue dogs, hunting dogs, guide dogs, and…

The purpose of this experiment was to compare components of the human and rat auditory event-related potential (ERP) in a serial feature-positive discrimination task. Subjects learned to respond to an auditory target stimulus when it followed a visual feature (X [right arrow] A+), but to not respond when it was presented alone (A-). Upon solving…

The Barnes maze is a spatial memory task that requires subjects to learn the position of a hole that can be used to escape the brightly lit, open surface of the maze. Two experiments assessed the relative importance of spatial (extra-maze) versus proximal visible cues in solving the maze. In Experiment 1, four groups of mice were trained either…