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You’ve heard about so-called “gateway drugs.” But did you know about…gateway sex? Let Dirk Hanson explain at Addiction Inbox.

Can science explain ghosts? Well, science can explain why we think we sometimes see ghosts, and the Neurocritic is on it: Neurophysiological Explanation for the Perception of Poltergeists.

At World of Psychology, Lauren Suval asks if texting hinders the development of social abilities. The answer, as with most things, is: it depends.

Using these four human superpowers as a hook, Changizi brings an evolutionary perspective to several of the most fundamental questions facing vision scientists today. For example, if color and people are both so central to our experience of the world, why do so few languages have color terms explicitly for skin colors? Why do humans have forward facing eyes? (You might think you know the answer to this one, but Changizi has a very different explanation.) How is it that most of us learn to read with relative ease, if reading itself is so new in evolutionary terms that our brains could not have evolved specialized reading mechanisms? (Hint: letters are designed such that they take advantage of our brain’s inherent systems for recognizing objects.)

And why do we so easily fall for visual illusions? Why do visual illusions persist even after we know that our eyes are fooling us? In what is perhaps the greatest triumph of this book, Changizi describes a sort of “periodic table” of visual illusions, which systematically explains why visual illusions don’t represent failures of the visual system, but are rather side-effects of several features built into it.

Why don't the vertical lines appear straight? In The Vision Revolution, Changizi explains this reason for this, and many other, illusions.

In answering these questions, Changizi combines evidence from comparative psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and linguistics in order to lay out a theoretical perspective for the evolution of the human visual system that could potentially revise much of what we think we know about human vision. While some of his ideas are quite radical (by conventional vision science standards), and many are speculative, I found them generally compelling. Despite the sometimes speculative nature of the ideas, each of them are carefully described, each with a set of empirically testable predictions.

While an important read for vision scientists, it is also extremely accessible to the non-expert reader. Throughout the text, Changizi uses lots of clear, jargon-free examples and do-it-yourself exercises so that you can experience exactly the kinds of visual and cognitive phenomena that he describes. In fact, this book would do well in an undergraduate sensation and perception course. It is refreshing to see a theoretical vision science book take such a broad, sweeping view of visual cognition.

The Vision Revolution is available in paperback at Amazon.com and is also available on the Kindle.

See also:
Review of The Vision Revolution in Scientific American MIND by Melinda Wenner

Disclaimer: I received this book as a personal gift from Mark Changizi; this review is entirely unsolicited.

At BishopBlog, Dorothy Bishop discusses a popular theory in the development of language and reading disorders: that there are genes implicated in such learning impairments that affect a process in the developing brain called “neuronal migration.”

Who Says ‘I Love You’ First? At the PsychCentral blog “Healing Together,” Suzanne Phillips discusses some unexpected findings.

“Using a little optogenetic trickery,” writes the blogger at The Cellular Scale, “you can directly activate specific worm neurons with light.” It’s a whole ‘nother kind of virtual reality (for worms).

Who invented autism? A nice, brief history from Neuroskeptic.

Sharks have lighter undersides than top sides. This provides camouflage against the light shining down from the ocean’s surface. But at different points in the water column, are varying amounts of light. Wouldn’t it be useful for sharks to alter the color of their skin depending on how deep they are? Doctor Zen describes a shark that does just that.

Sometime between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago, probably in the Middle East, the long, protracted process of domestication began to alter the genetic code of the wolf, eventually leaving us with the animals we know and love as domestic dogs. While there are several different theories as to exactly how dog domestication began, what is clear is that there were some wolves who were less fearful of humans than others. Over time, those wolves were incorporated into early human settlements. Perhaps humans and early dogs learned to hunt cooperatively – both species hunt primarily by outrunning their prey – or perhaps early dogs instead learned that they could avoid hunting by scavenging on the leftovers of human hunting parties. Whatever the initial reason for the incorporation of wolves into human society, there their descendents still remain.

By sharing an environment with humans, dogs left behind their ancestral environment and found a place in a new one. No longer would they have to hunt to eat; humans would come to provide for their care and feeding. It is probably no accident that the relationship between dogs and their owners mirrors the attachment relationship between parents and their children, behaviorally and physiologically. Indeed, humans who have strong bonds with their dogs have higher levels of oxytocin in their urine than those with weaker bonds.

But it isn’t only the source of their food that changed as wolves became dogs; their entire social ecology changed. Instead of sharing social space primarily with other wolves, dogs came to treat humans as social partners. This is one of the critical differences between a domesticate and a wild animal that is simply habituated to the presence of humans. Domestication is a genetic process; habituation is an experiential one. Domestication alters nature, habituation is nurture.

Several years ago, scientists at Eotvos University in Budapest wanted to determine whether the social-cognitive differences among dogs and wolves was primarily genetic or experiential. To do this, they hand-raised a group of dog puppies and a group of wolf pups from birth, resulting in roughly equivalent experiences. Any differences between the two groups’ social cognitive skills, then, would be attributable to genetics.

Wolf and dog pups were raised by humans starting four to six days after birth, before their eyes had fully opened. For the first months of their lives, the wolf and dog pups were in close contact with their human foster parents nearly twenty-four hours per day. They lived in the homes of their caregivers and slept with them at night. They were bottle-fed, and starting on the fourth or fifth week of life, hand fed with solid food. Their human caregivers carried them in a pouch so that the wolf pups and dog puppies could participate in as much of their daily activities as possible: traveling on public transportation, attending classes, visiting friends, and so on. Each of the pups had extensive experience meeting unfamiliar humans, and at least twice a week, they were socialized with each other as well as with unfamiliar adult dogs. The guiding principle for the hand-rearing paradigm, according to the researchers, was based not upon competition or aggressive interactions, but “to behave rather like a mother than a dominant conspecific.”

Would wolves, having been raised by humans, demonstrate social-cognitive skills that approached the sophistication of dogs? Or is social-cognitive aptitude encoded in dogs’ genes, a direct result of domestication?

In one simple task, a plate of food was presented to the wolf pups (at 9 weeks) or to the dog puppies (both at 5 weeks and at 9 weeks). However, the food was inaccessible to the animals; human help would be required to access it. The trick to getting the food was simple: all the animals had to do was make eye contact with the experimenter, and he or she would reward the dog with the food from the plate. Initially, all the animals attempted in vain to reach the food. However, by the second minute of testing, dogs began to look towards the humans. This increased over time and by the fourth minute there was a statistical difference. Dogs were more likely to initiate eye contact with the human experimenter than the wolves were. This is no small feat; initiating eye contact with the experimenter requires that the animal refocus its attention from the food to the human. Not only did the wolf pups not spontaneously initiate eye contact with the human experimenter, but they also failed to learn that eye contact was the key to solving their problem.

A second experiment, conducted when the wolves and puppies were between four and eleven months old, found similar results. Each animal was presented, in different testing sessions, with two different types of tasks. First, each of the wolves and dogs was trained to retrieve a food reward by opening a bin (in one task) or pulling a rope (in the second task). Then, after they had mastered the task, they were presented with an impossible version of the same problem. After attempting to retrieve the food, the dogs looked back towards the human caregivers. The wolves did no such thing. Dogs spontaneously initiated a communicative interaction with the humans earlier, and maintained it for longer periods of time, than did the human-reared wolves, who all but ignored their human caregivers.

How much time passed before the animals would look back towards their human caregivers?

Both dogs and wolves were equally adept at learning the two tasks, indicating that there were no group differences in terms of motivation or physical abilities, but large differences emerged when given impossible problems to solve. In both impossible tasks, as well as in the earlier eye contact experiment, dogs instinctively shifted their attention away from the food and towards the humans. Despite the fact that they had been fully socialized, the wolves treated each of the situations as physical problems rather than social ones. Only rarely did they ever attempt to engage in a communicative problem-solving interaction with a human. It’s not that wolves are unintelligent; it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Wolves are cooperative hunters, skilled at negotiating within their own social networks. It’s just that even after being raised by humans, wolves simply do not see humans as potential social partners. The dogs, however, quite rapidly took a social approach to solving each problem they were given. In one sense, this is a remarkable example of tool use. Only in this case, the humans were the tools, and the dogs the tool-users.

Gácsi M, Gyori B, Miklósi A, Virányi Z, Kubinyi E, Topál J, & Csányi V (2005). Species-specific differences and similarities in the behavior of hand-raised dog and wolf pups in social situations with humans. Developmental psychobiology, 47 (2), 111-22 PMID: 16136572

Miklósi A, Kubinyi E, Topál J, Gácsi M, Virányi Z, & Csányi V (2003). A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do. Current biology : CB, 13 (9), 763-6 PMID: 12725735

Related:
Might Pleistocene Fido Have Been A Fox?
Biological Evidence That Dog is Man’s Best Friend
Did Dogs Gain Their Social Intelligence By Accident?
Dingoes Ate My Nametag: Tool Use in a Dingo
Man’s new best friend? A forgotten Russian experiment in fox domestication

Photos: Grey wolf via Wikimedia Commons/Domestic dog copyright the author.

A trip to an unfamiliar part of the world is all you need in order to realize that humans have vastly different ways of eating, playing, talking, problem-solving, and so much more. Some of us use forks, while others prefer chopsticks, and still others simply eat with their hands. All three of these solutions emerged to the very same problem. But where do these cultural traditions come from? How do these differences persist over time? If we wish to understand the evolution of culture, then it is important to understand how how cultural traditions in other species emerge.

Chimpanzees appear to possess at least a basic form of culture: among six African chimp groups, for example, there are different traditions for throwing, inspecting wounds, and removing parasites. It is well known that chimpanzees use sticks to hunt for termites, but different groups eat the termites in different ways: some eat the insects directly from the stick itself, while others will run the termite-coated stick through their hands, and then bring their hands to their mouths. Different cultural traditions have also been observed in other primates, in dolphins, and across the animal kingdom.

For a long time, researchers thought that the main differences in traditions occur between groups: perhaps one group removes parasites with their teeth, while another prefers to snatch parasites with their fingernails. New research conducted with wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), published today in the journal PLoS ONE, paints a more complicated picture of cultural evolution, and Mom is at the center.

Primatologist Erica van de Waal and her colleagues presented six different groups of wild vervet monkeys with a new problem: dirty grapes. They were interested in how how different monkeys went about cleaning the grapes prior to eating them, and how the cleaning methods might then spread to other monkeys.

One possibility is that monkeys learn new traditions by imitating dominant individuals; in female-dominated vervet monkeys, whatever cleaning method was used by the dominant females might then ultimately spread throughout the group. This would mean that the main cultural differences would occur between groups.

However, it is also possible that cultural transmission occurs at the family level, rather than at the group level. This would mean that cultural differences would emerge between matrilines – groups of monkeys related through females – rather than between groups. This would allow for multiple traditions to coexist within a larger group.

Finally, there could be a genetic mechanism driving cultural traditions rather than a social one. If this was the case, then adult sisters would be more likely to share a grape cleaning method than non-related females, despite the fact that each sister had her own matriline.

The researchers presented monkeys with clear plastic boxes full of grapes, covered with sand. Since dominant individuals always get to eat first, they made sure that there were always enough grapes in the boxes for even the most subordinate individuals to get some. They repeated this fifteen times over the course of two years. Throughout the experiment, they noted that four different cleaning techniques had emerged. Some rubbed the grapes in their hands to remove the sand, others rubbed the grapes against some other surface such as stones or branches, another set of monkeys peeled the grapes with their teeth but ate only the insides, and yet another group split the grapes open with their hands and ate the insides. Some monkeys didn’t clean the grapes at all, and instead ate them as they were, sand and all.

Mothers and children were more likely to show the same cleaning technique, regardless of group membership or the status of the mother within her group’s dominance hierarchy. As sessions progressed, each individual monkey became more likely to use the technique used within his or her own matriline, even if he or she began the experiment using a different method. And monkeys used their mothers’ techniques even when other members of the matriline were absent, indicating that the effects were not the result of transient imitation.

Importantly, individual monkeys changed their strategies over time to match the techniques of their matriline. Since “convergence implies social learning,” according to van de Waal, it is unlikely that genetic differences would account for grape cleaning techniques. And each adult female was more likely to share a technique with her sons and daughters than with her sisters, lending further support for the social origins for grape cleaning methods.

This raises the possibility that small differences among matrilines might eventually become stable cultural traditions. To see if these differences had the potential to become more persistent traditions, during each of the last five sessions, researchers left out a bucket with water next to the sandy grapes. None of the monkeys ever used the water to clean the grapes, suggesting that they were more likely to stick with their matrilineal techniques than to switch to a more efficient cleaning method. In fact, the researchers conducted a sixteenth testing session, one year after the fifteenth had taken place. Even one year later, monkeys were still using the cleaning methods that had initially spread through their families. Put another way, the cleaning methods had stabilized among matrilines. And stable differences in addressing identical problems is the very definition of culture. Just as some humans use forks while others use chopsticks to eat, some monkeys rubbed the sand off the grapes while others peeled the skin away.

Taken together, van de Waal’s study shows that the mother may be a more important source of social learning for vervet monkeys than any other group member, regardless of the dominance status of the mother. However, they point out that this experiment can’t discern whether children learned from their mothers, or if mom learned from her children. Perhaps van de Waal and her colleagues will return to these monkeys in several years to repeat the experiment and see if the next generation of monkeys still converge on matrilineal grape cleaning strategies. If so, that will provide convincing evidence that Mom does, indeed, know best.

van de Waal E, Krutzen M, Hula J, Goudet J, Bshary R (2012) Similarity in Food Cleaning Techniques within Matrilines in Wild Vervet Monkeys. PLoS ONE 7(4): e35694. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035694

Images: Header photo via Flickr/Arno and Louise Wildlife; vervet and baby via Flickr/Doug88888.

For more on social learning:
How Do You Figure Out How Chimps Learn? Peanuts.
Cold-Blooded Cognition: Social Cognition in a Non-Social Reptile?
Are Infants Born Prepared For Learning? The Case for Natural Pedagogy
Is Pedagogy Specific to Humans? Teaching in the Animal World

Stigma, neuroscience, cross-cultural psychology, and goats! Learn about why the Chinese language has a new symbol for “epilepsy,” at Mind Hacks.

Jordan Gaines is a neuroscience PhD student and a young science writer. Find out why she decided to become a scientist and science writer: Science: why I do it AND write it.

At the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Deborah Blum discusses the problems with reporting on the supposed corn syrup theory of autism. Find out why she writes, “Honestly, readers, I had to get up and kick a piece of furniture.”

Trichotillomania is a rare psychiatric disorder that involves hair pulling. At the PsychCentral blog Therapy Soup, read a fascinating interview about this disorder with Marla Deibler: part 1, and part 2.

For more on getting started in science blogging, see my Science Blogging 101 series:
Science Blogging 101: Part 1
Science Blogging 101: Part 2 – The Audience

For more on domesticated foxes: Man’s new best friend? A forgotten Russian experiment in fox domestication – by me at the Scientific American Guest Blog

Just a quick announcement that I’ll be joining fellow SA blogger Danielle Lee, Dr. Isis, and Pascale Lane in what promises to be the “world’s most amazingest session ever” on Saturday at 3pm at the Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego.

Click on the flyer to enlarge

“To prepare for Wimbledon, Bjorn grew a beard and wore the same Fila shirt during the matches.” At Why We Reason, Sam McNerney discusses the science of superstition.

Why do we say that we travel “up north” or “down south”? It turns out that people, in general, assume it’s hillier up north. Even if it isn’t! Read about it at BPS Research Digest.

At the TEDMED 2012 conference, Addiction Inbox blogger Dirk Hanson caught up with Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky to discuss the disease model of addiction.

There’s a lot of talk about the relationship between creativity and mental illness. But let’s not romanticize it, warns the Neurocritic: suffering for art is still suffering.

He was a bit surprised to find that the baby monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth monkeys, only approaching the wire monkeys when hungry.

Now, half a century later, teacher Brad Wray and his independent study students from Arundel High School in Maryland have set one of those experiments to music.

Want to learn more about Harlow? Check out Deborah Blum’s Love at Goon Park

via Association for Psychological Science

I’m excited to announce, though, that I’m starting up a stint as an editor at ScienceSeeker.org! I’m excited for the chance to read more broadly than only those posts that cite peer-reviewed research in psychology and neuroscience, and to share those posts (though I will still lean heavily on psychology and neuroscience blogs).

Previously, I published my weekly Research Blogging editor’s selections on Tuesdays. At ScienceSeeker, the selection process works a bit differently – I try to pick one or two posts every few days, instead of just once per week. Even still, when possible, I’ll try to post a weekly round-up of my picks on this blog, as usual, on Tuesdays. In addition, you can follow @SciSeekEds on twitter to see the selections from me and the other editors.

My first set of Science Seeker Editor’s Selections are:

Electric eels aren’t the only electric animals – at Science-Based Life. Of course, as the good Doctor Zen points out in the comments, since all nervous systems rely on electric potentials, all animals are electric!

Hyenas give up eating garbage for Lent, and hunt donkeys instead. Matt Soniak covers this story at his blog, though it was also covered by me, Elizabeth Preston, and Ed Yong. Interesting to compare the way four science writers covered the same story.

At Psych Your Mind, guest blogger Maya discusses the psychology of The Hunger Games.

Finally, if the age of the dinosaurs wasn’t scary enough already, Elizabeth Preston at Inkfish points out that there was lots of fire, too.

It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, which means that Christians are giving up meat for Lent, Jewish people are eating matzah instead of bread for Passover, and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are replacing their regular meals with donkeys, in honor of the Ethiopian holiday Abye Tsome.

Hyenas will eat just about anything organic. They’ll chow down on mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. And it doesn’t matter whether those critters are living or dead. Or rotten. Or infected with anthrax. Hyenas are also known to dine on garbage and dung. This doesn’t mean they’re not skilled hunters. In fact, in the Maasai Mara ecosystem in Kenya, they hunt as much as ninety-five percent of their food. But when there are humans around, it is perhaps a better strategy to rely on scavenging.

The neighborhoods around the northern Ethiopian regional capital of Mekelle, is a very poor area. Despite the high levels of poverty and the scarcity of resources, inhabitants of the region adhere strictly to the religious restrictions pertaining to meat eating. “The remains of slaughtered animals and all redundant pack animals are always left at the nearest convenient site, usually simply just outside the people’s compounds,” Yirga writes.

Mekelle, in northern Ethiopia, is indicated by the red marker.

That all changes, though, during the 55 days leading up to Easter, when members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church give up meat for a holiday known as Abye Tsome or Hudade. Biologist Gidey Yirga and colleagues wondered what effect the reduced supply of meat during Abye Tsome might mean for the hyenas that rely on human table scraps to survive the rest of the year.

They collected 553 samples of hyena scat and analyzed the hairs found inside each sample to determine which animals made up each hyena’s last feast. While the hyenas dined on all manner of beast prior to and after the holiday – sheep, horses, cattle, goats, and more – they mainly fed on donkeys during the fast period itself. Yirga notes that, unlike other livestock, “donkeys are kept outside the compound at night, and weak donkeys are abandoned altogether, which makes them a relatively easy food source.”

In the areas around Mekelle, hyenas rarely attack humans, and Yirga reasons that this is because hyenas don’t feel threatened. Humans appreciate their work: hyenas are regarded as “municipal workers.” In fact, hyenas are the most efficient janitors on the campus of Mekelle University, where they scavenge the carcasses of dead animals at the veterinary college.

An ecosystem can be like a precariously balanced house of cards. Most of the year, the hyenas and humans around Mekelle live in relative harmony. Humans toss out their leftovers, and hyenas gobble them up. But the religious fasts leading up to Easter disrupt hyenas’ menus, causing them to alter their foraging strategies by hunting donkeys. The loss of donkeys to hyena predation, in turn, causes problems for the humans who rely on donkeys for collecting fresh water, working on farms, and carrying produce and goods to and from the markets. It’s a problem for humans, but only for a few weeks each year.

Other communities deal with potential livestock losses in more aggressive ways. In southern Ethiopia, for example, lions (Panthera leo) are pre-emptively killed anytime they get too close to humans or livestock. As a result, the amount of lions in the ecosystem has decreased, despite the fact that the ecosystem is fully capable of sustaining viable populations of lions (and hyenas, too, for that matter). “We found only two lions and six hyenas,” in Nechisar National Park, Southern Ethiopia, Yirga said, due to “conflicts with the communities living inside and adjacent to the national parks.” This is partially due to the killing, but also probably because the remaining lions and hyenas have learned to avoid those villages where they might be killed.

These are both examples of other carnivores altering their behavior due to changes in human behavior, but the results couldn’t be more different. In the north, villagers tend not to lose livestock to predation because hyenas scavenge instead (except for several weeks in the springtime). In the south, villagers tend not to lose livestock to predation because many of the big predators have been driven to extinction or scared away.

This leads me to speculate: could sharing meat with lions in the south, as is done with hyenas in the north, result in improved human-lion relations, decreased losses of livestock due to predation, and an overall healthier ecosystem?

Yirga, G., De Iongh, H.H., Leirs, H., Gebrihiwot, K., Deckers, J. & Bauer, H. (2012). Adaptability of large carnivores to changing anthropogenic food sources: diet change of spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) during Christian fasting period in northern Ethiopia, Journal of Animal Ecology, no. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2012.01977.x

Image: Hyena in the Serengeti, gnawing on the skull of a gnu via Flickr/appenz

For more perspectives on this research, see:
Giving Up Trash for Lent: How A Human Custom Forces Hyenas to Hunt by Matt Soniak
Hyenas Fast During Lent Too by Elizabeth Preston
In run-up to Easter, fasting Ethiopians force hyenas to kill donkeys by Ed Yong

By the @JewishTweets.

I first became aware of Dr. Terry L. Maple when I read his article in the latest issue of The Observer, the magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. Maple is former president and CEO of the Zoo Atlanta as well as the Palm Beach Zoo, and is currently a professor in the departments of psychology and integrative biology at the Harriett Wilkes Honors College at the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University.

Dr. Terry L. Maple

Dr. Maple became the Director of the Atlanta Zoo in 1984 at the request of then-Mayor Andrew Young. As Maple recounts in The Observer, the zoo had become a “national disgrace,” following the mysterious death of an elephant uncovered in a shallow grave in North Carolina. “Twinkles” the elephant became the poster pachyderm for zoo mismanagement, and it was then that Young turned to Maple. As a postdoc at UC Davis and young professor at Emory, Maple had created a line of research that blended developmental and environmental psychology that grew directly out of his early research on social deprivation in rhesus monkeys. “I easily recognized the signs of psychopathology in just about every zoo monkey,” he wrote, and “zoo personnel, who are not trained in psychological science, for the most part, failed to recognize the deleterious effects of their standard management practices. Young wisely realized that Maple could establish an evidence-based approach to zoo management and animal welfare. (Related: Women and children first, by Eric M. Johnson.)

Gorilla, San Diego Zoo. August 7, 2011

Maple had many successes in his 24 years in zoo management, but a few are worth highlighting. One male lowland gorilla, “Willie B” had been confined and isolated to a small cage for twenty-seven years. Under Maple’s oversight, Willie responded quite well to new social opportunities, producing seven offspring by his forty-first birthday. In fact, he was the oldest gorilla to have successfully sired offspring in a zoo. Another gorilla named “Ivan” spent years as an “attraction” at a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington until Maple negotiated an agreement that transferred Ivan to the Zoo Atlanta. Once there, he was successfully integrated into a social group. In 2009, at the Palm Beach Zoo, Maple oversaw the opening of the Melvin J. and Claire Levine Animal Care Complex and Center for Conservation Medicine. The complex included the first LEED-certified zoo veterinary hospital in the United States.

As is the case in most scientific fields, there are more PhDs who graduate from psychology departments each year than there are openings in academic departments for postdoctoral researchers or for tenure-track assistant professors. Zoo management is one important alternative to the tenure-track (at least for those with a background in animal behavior or cognition) that seems to me to be off the radar of most late-stage graduate students. It was with this in mind that I reached out by email to Dr. Maple and asked if he would answer a few questions about his own transition from academia to the zoo industry.

What’s your scientific/academic background? What has your career trajectory been like since grad school?

I received my Ph.D. degree in psychobiology from the University of California at Davis. My first job was at Emory University in Atlanta. Recruited to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1978, I was promoted to Full Professor in 1984 just before Mayor Andrew Young summoned me to his office to discuss the interim directorship of the failing Atlanta Zoo. Tech administrators worked out a deal that would keep me on the faculty part-time. My students and I embarked on a seventeen year journey researching and documenting revolutionary changes at the zoo. As part of this process the zoo was re-branded Zoo Atlanta in 1985.

Many people use animals in their research as a model for understanding humans. By contrast, you seem to have used what we know about humans to inform your work with animals. Can you describe how you arrived at the realization that the human-animal relationship was bidirectional in this way?

Indeed, by teaching Environmental Psychology at Georgia Tech, and from the work of my mentor, Robert Sommer, I learned early in my career that there was a lot more information about how the built environment altered human behavior. In spite of this fact, the earliest intellectual contributions to the EP literature came from biologists and anthropologists such as Calhoun and Hall, students of territoriality and personal space. Sommer’s two books, Personal Space, and Tight Spaces, were especially influential. One important and often ignored source was Abraham Maslow’s classic Toward a Psychology of Being. He was Harlow‘s first graduate student at Wisconsin and I found information in his book on humanistic psychology that was directly applicable to zoo habitats, standards, and practices. Founder of the “Human Potential” movement, I found his ideas useful in developing a kind of “Primate Potential.”

The bear enclosure from the "old" LA Zoo, built sometime in the 1930s, is not an enriching environment for any animal. In 1965, the zoo moved to its current location, a few miles away in Griffith Park.

How unique is your approach in the field of zoo management? Has the zoo management field been receptive to your ideas? What about the academic/scientific community?

My ideas have been accepted quite well among keepers, curators, and other scientists. We are seeing many of my ideas in the work of zoo architects and this design approach has been collaborative among many of my close colleagues such as Gary Lee of CLR (JGG: a Philadelphia-based design firm). However, many directors with a business background don’t appreciate the importance of welfare and due to criticism leveled by welfare/rights oriented critics they are a little gun-shy of overt welfare changes. I do think this will change however and some zoos (e.g. Detroit Zoo, Oakland Zoo, Brookfield Zoo) are beginning to embrace a welfare orientation.

I’ve had no trouble publishing my work in major journals such as Environment and Behavior and the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Our book Ethics on the Ark (1995) was one of the most successful Smithsonian books and it has been widely influential in the zoo profession. My recent talk (Building Ethical Arks) at the University of California at Davis brought a large crowd of interested students and young faculty, so I think there is a bit of a movement building. I wrote an important book chapter about elephant welfare in a Tufts publication (An Elephant in the Room) that caused a bit of a stir among zoo folks.

What would you recommend for graduate students who are interested in bringing a scientific, empirical approach to animal welfare and zoo/aquarium management? What kinds of jobs exist for those kinds of people?

I used to recommend they study with me at Georgia Tech. So many of my students are working in influential zoo positions now, so there are jobs for those who gain the skills we taught at Tech/Zoo Atlanta. You have to find a mentor who is doing this kind of work and then make contributions that get you noticed. You have to publish regularly in good journals and then find the right job. The scientist/practitioner model is represented by the scientific curator in modern zoos. Many of my students found zoos that wanted Ph.D. curators. They are currently working at Lincoln Park, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Denver Zoo, Zoo Atlanta, and Santa Barbara Zoo.

Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), San Diego Zoo, November 20, 2011.

What new projects or ideas are taking up your time right now?

The one idea that I am pursuing with other zoos that is fairly new is the concept of “wellness.” I’m helping the San Francisco Zoo to implement a comprehensive wellness program that will inform exhibit design and help them to monitor and enhance wellness through advances in nutrition and training to activate/exercise animals in the zoo population. Wellness is a blend of biology and psychology and it also provides visitors with an example of how wellness in zoo animals can contribute to our understanding of wellness in our families and our communities. I think the wellness concept will be prove to be a very useful concept as we strive for optimal environments, standards, and practices for each and every unique species in the zoo.

Does blogging and social media (twitter, facebook, google+, etc) figure into your work at all? If so, how? Do you find these tools to be useful for outreach?

My daughter Molly is an expert in social media and she has taught me that it is an important means of communicating the power of our ideas. I’m working on a weblog in my current consulting work so I hope to export ideas and commentary in the coming months. Right now I’m helping non-profit leaders and scholars in Georgia, Florida, and California so I am getting a good response from professionals who need help. Tweets are not my style (too superficial) but I expect to do a lot of blogging.

Thank you for your time!

Related:
A Zoo Where the Animals Come First by Terry L. Maple
Social Cognition in Polar Bears – from The Thoughtful Animal archives
Sunday Photoblogging: Old LA Zoo
Women and Children First – by Eric M. Johnson at Times Higher Ed

Images: Terry Maple via The Observer. All other images copyright the author. Top: Malayan Tiger, San Diego Zoo, November 20, 2011.

Before beginning the research I’m currently doing, I started grad school conducting MRI research of reading and dyslexia. In this study, I established a connection between two disparate lines of reading research, by showing a relationship between reading experience and cortical thickness in parts of the brain we know to be involved in reading.

The abstract:

This study investigated relationships among cortical thickness in the left-hemisphere reading network, and reading skill and experience in adult nonimpaired readers. Given the relationship between print exposure and reading, it is possible that print exposure is related to cortical structure. The pattern of correlations indicated that individuals with higher print exposure had better reading skills and thicker cortices. Furthermore, print exposure accounted for unique variance in cortical thickness in part of the left-hemisphere reading network after accounting for reading skill. This suggests that some of the variation in cortical thickness in adults might be attributable to reading experience, independently of reading skill.

Expect a more elaborate post on this next week.

Goldman, J.G., & Manis, F. (2012). Relationships Among Cortical Thickness, Reading Skill, and Print Exposure in Adults Scientific Studies of Reading, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2011.620673

• Did language emerge from the neural systems supporting aimed throwing? The argument, explained by Andrew Wilson, is more reasonable than you might expect.
• Sex, Lies and… Spider Silk? At The Scorpion and the Frog, blogger Miss Behavior discusses the nursery web spider’s guide to love and sex.
• Here’s an easy way to modify your messy roommate’s behavior: make the place smell like citrus. At BPS Research Digest, find out why: Passengers litter less on carriages that smell of cleaning product.

Blue dots are for locals (people who have taken pictures in a city over a period of a month or more), red are for tourists (people who took pictures in a city for less than a month) and yellow dots represent photos of undetermined origin.

Here are two maps for Los Angeles. The first one shows Santa Monica and West LA. The second one shows downtown LA and Pasadena. I’ve taken the maps and added labels.

Santa Monica and West LA. Click to enlarge.

Downtown LA and Pasadena. Click to enlarge.

Eyeballing these maps, it appears as if tourists tend to take photos at a handful of common locations, while locals tend to take photos primarily everywhere else. UCLA/Westwood seems to be the exception to that trend. It also appears as if those who live in Pasadena (at least among the photos included in this analysis) don’t use their cameras all that much.

I wonder what would result if I mapped my photos onto these images?

I was recently reminded of the fantastic 2001 PBS/NOVA series Evolution, which was released in tandem with Carl Zimmer’s book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.

The whole series is great, but episode 6, The Mind’s Big Bang, was my favorite. And this segment in particular, starting around the 2:15 mark, featuring Andrew Whiten. I think it’s the best video explanation of the “Sally-Anne” test I’ve yet seen, and clearly explains some of the key theory-of-mind differences between humans and non-human animals.

Also, you can’t beat a science documentary narrated by Liam Neeson.

(Here’s a link to a Youtube playlist for the entire episode, in order.)

In one sense, the main theme of the Being Human conference was “illusion.” Illusions occur when what we perceive does not match with the true state of the world. When our thoughts do not accurately reflect objective reality. Visual illusions make this obvious, and we usually enjoy them. We see one white square and one black square, but they turn out to truly be the same shade of grey. Or two lines of equal length appear to be different. A waterfall flows ever downward yet somehow also falls up.

Magicians stake their careers on the idea that humans enjoy being fooled. Perhaps we enjoy illusions when we are prepared to experience them. But other illusions are so powerful, so pervasive, so woven into the fabric of human experience, that pointing them out makes us supremely uncomfortable. Perhaps it is that discomfort that prompts us to try to pick apart the mysteries of human experience. Scientists and artists alike attempt to peer under the hood of Homo sapiens, hoping to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the inner machinations of mind and brain. We build monuments to their complexity: giant helium-cooled magnets called MRI machines, or tangles of wires knitted into an EEG hat. You think free will is a complicated question? Try the perception of color.

Scientist-artist Beau Lotto pointed out that even something as simple as the perceptual experience of color is subject to illusion; the colors we perceive are not necessarily indicative of the physical nature of the light that hits our retinas. Our brain is, in other words, prepared to interpret certain parts of the visual field differently, depending on the surrounding context. The white and grey squares on either side of the table leg (below) are actually the same color. But the presence of a shadow causes your brain to experience them differently.

In a fun demonstration with Peter Baumann, Lotto also pointed out that our perception of where our bodies are in space is also an illusion of sorts. Baumann was asked to practice hitting a target some 10 feet away with a small ball. Then, he put on prism glasses, which shifted his visual field by 20 degrees. The result was that it appeared to Baumann as if the target was several feet to the right. With some trial and error, however, he quickly learned to overcompensate for the shift, by throwing to the left. This is something that water birds do without effort as they dive for fish, which are actually inches away from where they seem to appear. And, as was expected, when he removed the glasses, he persisted in throwing the ball too far to the left! It’s not vision that is changing, per se. Instead, what changed was Baumann’s perception of the location of his body in space. Just as with the visual illusions above, the prism glasses created a sort of proprioceptive illusion. Change the environment, and you change behavior.

Illusions aren’t all fun and games, though. The illusion of a phantom limb – and the therapy to alleviate its associated pain – (what else would V.S. Ramachandran have spoken about?) is just as real as the color illusions, and just as confusing, but has important therapeutic and public health implications. The existence of phantom limbs shows us that even the sensory awareness of our own bodies is, in its own way, illusory. Using just a cheap mirror, Ramachandran has been able to reduce the pain felt by hundreds of sufferers of phantom limb pain. These are people who, due to some accident or injury, have had one or more of their limbs amputated. Despite the rational knowledge that their limbs are missing, some part of the brain doesn’t know this. Some neurons still fire as though they are receiving sensory information from those limbs, and when those feelings are of pain, it’s bad news. How can a doctor provide therapy, though, for a limb that doesn’t even exist? By tricking the visual system into perceiving the physical presence of the missing limb – with just a mirror reflecting the image of the opposite limb – Ramachandran can help these patients feel better. One illusion is used to counter the effects of the other.

But you don’t need a missing limb to experience this. By covering up someone’s hand with a cloth and placing a rubber hand next to it, scientists have been able to re-write a person’s mental body plan. First, the experimenter simultaneously stimulates the real hand (outside the view of the participant) and the rubber hand. The participant very quickly begins to perceive the rubber hand as his own. Then, the experimenter does something surprising: he stabs the rubber hand with a fork. The participant knows that it isn’t really his hand. Still, he recoils at the sight of impending danger to the false appendage. It isn’t just our body’s location in space that can be illusory, but even the things that constitute the body in the first place!

Illusions of vision and illusions of the body are one thing, but what can really bother people are the illusions of choice. Laurie Santos created of a token economy in a colony of capuchin monkeys at Yale. Monkeys were trained to trade metal washers for food. Despite the fact that no other species naturally uses any sort of market economy, these monkeys learned to use money to buy food quite easily. But here’s the really interesting part: their decisions were subject to the same sorts of biases as humans. Their decisions, and ours, are irrational. For example, capuchins tended to favor smaller, sooner rewards over larger, future rewards under some circumstances. Just like us. Presented with two mathematically equivalent decisions, monkeys chose differently depending on how the information was presented. Just like us. Of course, we think our decisions are rational. Isn’t rational thought what separates man from monkey? Call it the illusion of rational decision-making. (And: the illusion of thinking that humans are qualitatively different from non-human animals.)

This illusion doesn’t end with economic decisions. Did you know that a disproportionate number of dentists are named Dennis or Denise? It’s true, at least according to David Eagleman. And people are more likely than would be expected by chance to marry someone who shares the same first initial. John and Jamie. Mark and Michelle. These are quite clearly bad ways to choose careers or to choose mates, and yet those patterns exist. In real life. We only think we control our choices. It’s all an illusion.

Given that so much of the human experience is built upon illusion, what does this say for what it means to be human? In his talk, Eagleman pointed out that the brain is more like a parliament than a monarchy. And the “you” that you perceive to be in the driver’s seat is but one voting member of a larger assembly. The self is, in a very real way, an illusion. Most of the neural computations that comprise each of “your” behaviors and “your” experiences occur below the level of conscious awareness. Imagine, Eagleman said, that a computer gained autonomous control over each of its peripheral devices, ripped the cover off of the tower, and pointed the webcam at the circuits and wires inside. This, essentially, has described much of the human scientific endeavour. And we’re the only species that does this. We are the only species that is obsessed with its own purpose and origins. We’re the only species (contrary to some accounts) that gets together to discuss the nuances of what it means to be us. Perhaps this, precisely, is what it means to be human.

Still, I wonder: if everything is, in one way or another, an illusion, then what kinds of answers we can expect to find? Are we just fooling ourselves?

Related:
Videos of the talks from Being Human 2012
Science 2.0 at Being Human – by Hank Campbell

Images: visual illusions via LottoLab and also Wikimedia Commons. Header image via Flickr/Being Human 2012.

I’ll be at the Being Human conference in San Francisco tomorrow, March 24, livetweeting it, and looking for interesting things to write about.

And you can, too, even if you’re not in SF, because the entire program will be livestreamed. Here’s the information:

When: 24 March 2012, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time
Where: http://f4a.tv/wgZrPG or BeingHuman2012.org

The program should be great, if the impressive list of speakers is any indication.

• What does The Little Prince have to do with psychology? Quite a bit. Read this beautiful post by Maria Konnikova at Literally Psyched. The Big Lesson of a Little Prince: (Re)capture the Creativity of Childhood.
• You’ve just read a paper that claims to be about embodied cognition. But is it really? Here’s a handy field guide from Andrew Wilson at Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists.
• “Does the Human Dorsal Stream,” asks the Neurocritic, “Really Process Elongated Vegetables?”
• The powerful neurotoxin that is Botox. Jordan Gaines in top form.

That’s it for this week… Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

The rest of the downtown LA at night photoset is over on Google+/Picasa, and is visible even if you don’t use G+.

Teaser photo via Fotopedia/griangrafanna

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