Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted both adult dogs and young dog puppies with object choice tasks in which a human indicated one of…

The present study addresses the hypothesis that detection of biological motion is an intrinsic capacity of the visual system guided by a non-species-specific predisposition for the pattern of vertebrate movement and investigates the role of global vs. local information in biological motion detection. Two-day-old babies exposed to a biological…

Newborn chicks were tested for their sensitivity to number vs. continuous physical extent of artificial objects they had been reared with soon after hatching. Because of the imprinting process, such objects were treated by chicks as social companions. We found that when the objects were similar, chicks faced with choices between 1 vs. 2 or 2 vs. 3…