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Simple Summary: Due to climate change and human interference, many species are now without habitats and on the brink of extinction. Zoos and other conservation spaces allow for non-human animal preservation and public education about endangered species and ecosystems. Monitoring the health and well-being of animals in care, while providing species-specific environments, is critical for zoo and conservation staff. In order to best provide such care, keepers and researchers need to gather as much information as possible about individual animals and species as a whole. This paper focuses on existing technology to monitor animals, providing a review on the history of technology, including recent technological advancements and current limitations. Subsequently, we provide a brief introduction to our proposed novel computer software: an artificial intelligence software capable of unobtrusively and non-invasively tracking individuals' location, estimating position, and analyzing behaviour. This innovative technology is currently being trained with orangutans at the Toronto Zoo and will allow for mass data collection, permitting keepers and researchers to closely monitor individual animal welfare, learn about the variables impacting behaviour and provide additional enrichment or interventions accordingly. With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals' location, heart rate, and movement, often using a device that is physically attached to the monitored animals. However, to our knowledge, there is currently no technology that is able to do this unobtrusively and non-invasively. Here, we review the history of technology for use with animals, recent technological advancements, current limitations, and a brief introduction to our proposed novel software. Canadian tech mogul EAIGLE Inc. has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution capable of determining where people and assets are within public places or attractions for operational intelligence, security, and health and safety applications. The solution also monitors individual temperatures to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19. This technology has been adapted for use at the Toronto Zoo, initiated with a focus on Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) given the close physical similarity between orangutans and humans as great ape species. This technology will be capable of mass data collection, individual identification, pose estimation, behaviour monitoring and tracking orangutans' locations, in real time on a 24/7 basis, benefitting both zookeepers and researchers looking to review this information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Comparative research on the origins of human language often focuses on a limited number of language-related cognitive functions or anatomical structures that are compared across species. The underlying assumption of this approach is that a single or a limited number of factors may crucially explain how language appeared in the human lineage. Another potentially fruitful approach is to consider human language as the result of a (unique) assemblage of multiple cognitive and anatomical components, some of which are present in other species. This paper is a first step in that direction. It focuses on the baboon, a non-human primate that has been studied extensively for years, including several brain, anatomical, cognitive and cultural dimensions that are involved in human language. This paper presents recent data collected on baboons regarding (1) a selection of domain-general cognitive functions that are core functions for language, (2) vocal production, (3) gestural production and cerebral lateralization, and (4) cumulative culture. In all these domains, it shows that the baboons share with humans many cognitive or brain mechanisms which are central for language. Because of the multidimensionality of the knowledge accumulated on the baboon, that species is an excellent nonhuman primate model for the study of the evolutionary origins of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers in the special issue of "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences" devoted to cognition in animals, including a paper which proposes a cognitive architecture that can generate solutions to problems in the physical world in the case of a New Caledonian crow or a rook, and a paper offering an associative-cybernetic theory for associative learning in animals.

This paper addresses the question of how the brain of an animal achieves cognitive integration--that is to say how it manages to bring its fullest resources to bear on an ongoing situation. To fully exploit its cognitive resources, whether inherited or acquired through experience, it must be possible for unanticipated coalitions of brain processes to form. This facilitates the novel recombination of the elements of an existing behavioural repertoire, and thereby enables innovation. But in a system comprising massively many anatomically distributed assemblies of neurons, it is far from clear how such openended coalition formation is possible. The present paper draws on contemporary findings in brain connectivity and neurodynamics, as well as the literature of artificial intelligence, to outline a possible answer in terms of the brain's most richly connected and topologically central structures, its so-called connective core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon’s selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal’s advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When presented with structured sequences to learn, do nonhuman animals abstract and learn relational information-do they induce and learn rules? This paper provides an overview of the current evidence that bears on this question from our recent behavioral and psychobiological research on rat sequential learning. Evidence is presented that rats are sensitive to hierarchical structure in response sequences, that phrasing can bias rats' perception of pattern structure, that rats induce pattern structures from nonadjacent items in "interleaved" patterns, and that rule learning processes are active concurrently with other learning processes. The paper also describes work on the psychobiology of sequential learning that shows that multiple concurrent cognitive processes can be dissociated by MK-801, an NMDA receptor antagonist, and by other drug and lesion manipulations. Taken together, the results indicate that rats use rule learning processes concurrently with associative learning processes in a wide variety of sequential learning problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of animal sentience is fundamental to many disciplines and imperative to the animal welfare movement. In this review, we examined what is being explored and discussed, regarding animal sentience, within the scientific literature. Rather than attempting to extract meaning from the many complex and abstract definitions of animal sentience, we searched over two decades of scientific literature using a peer-reviewed list of 174 keywords. The list consisted of human emotions, terminology associated with animal sentience, and traits often thought to be indicative of subjective states. We discovered that very little was actually being explored, and instead there was already much agreement about what animals can feel. Why then is there so much scepticism surrounding the science of animal sentience? Sentience refers to the subjective states of animals, and so is often thought to be impossible to measure objectively. However, when we consider that much of the research found to accept and utilise animal sentience is performed for the development of human drugs and treatment, it appears that measuring sentience is, after all, not quite as impossible as was previously thought. In this paper, we explored what has been published on animal sentience in the scientific literature and where the gaps in research lie. We drew conclusions on the implications for animal welfare science and argued for the importance of addressing these gaps in our knowledge. We found that there is a need for more research on positive emotional states in animals, and that there is still much to learn about taxa such as invertebrates. Such information will not only be useful in supporting and initiating legislative amendments but will help to increase understanding, and potentially positive actions and attitudes towards animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A traditional view of cognition is that it involves an internal process that represents, tracks or predicts an external process. This is not a general characteristic of all complex neural processing or feedback control, but rather implies specific forms of processing giving rise to specific behavioural capabilities. In this paper, I will review the evidence for such capabilities in insect navigation and learning. Do insects know where they are, or do they only know what to do? Do they learn what stimuli mean, or do they only learn how to behave? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scientific researches have been conducted recently based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve animal welfare and health related problems. However, no review study was conducted to assess the potential of AI in solving the diverse application problems in several animal species including ruminants, pig and poultry. To fill in this gap, this paper provides a systematic review on scientific research advancement in AI related animal farming based on 131 research publications over the past four decades. It was shown that the number of related studies has increased significantly since 2016, and the most intensive studies were focused on animal behavior detection and recognition, and concentrated mostly on farm animal species of pig (37.95%), cattle (37.44%), and poultry (16.92%); Also, most scientific research in animal farming driven by sensors and AI models were focused on data collection, processing, assessment, and analysis in the areas of animal behavior detection, disease monitoring, growth estimation, and environment monitoring at the experimental stage; Moreover, some technical challenges on AI like the accuracy and cost need to be improved before it could come into use in the commercial animal farming. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theory frames animal dispersal as an outcome of potentially complex, multi-factorial interactions and tradeoffs that may vary across individual, sex, rank, age, social group, species, habitat and time. Empirical data relevant to a broad range of the potential costs and benefits incurred by dispersal are, not surprisingly, limited for many mammals and other vertebrates. Here we present the first report on dispersal in a wild population of the Neotropical primate Saimiri sciureus (Primates: Cebidae). Long-term observations (1998-2001) of this squirrel monkey represent part of a broader study of the forest community at Raleighvallen in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. These new dispersal records for S. sciureus are combined with comparable information from congeners, S. boliviensis in Peru and S. oerstedii in Costa Rica. The resulting three-way compilation includes the ecological, social and mating context for each congener. Further enhancing the inherent phylogenetic control of a within-genus comparison, these data were collected with the explicit intent of joint analyses, and the study sites for these small, arboreal social mammals are three of the least disturbed extant Neotropical forests in the historical record. Saimiri appears to merit description as the genus with the most diverse set of species dispersal patterns yet documented among mammals. (1) S. sciureus of both sexes undertake dispersal on several to many occasions during their lifetime. Females and immatures commonly transfer between troops. The large portion of male S. sciureus spend their adult years as solitary or peripheral males. Few males attain secure residence in a mixed-sex troop, a prerequisite for mating success. (2) On attainment of sexual maturity, male S. boliviensis emigrate with their same-age cohort, first joining all-male bands, and eventually entering mixed-sex troops with this same natal male birth cohort. Natal female S. boliviensis are philopatric and form cohesive matrilines. Within-troop competition determines each matriline's priority of access to fruit resources. (3) In contrast to both S. sciureus and S. boliviensis, S. oerstedii males are philopatric and maintain tight affiliation with same age-cohort males. Natal female S. oerstedii emigrate as juveniles prior to their first mating season, and may undertake secondary dispersals in subsequent years. Squirrel monkeys represent a genus with realistic prospects of discriminating the costs and benefits germane to species-typical dispersal strategies. To this end, we collate 30 different causal parameters commonly invoked as influencing mammalian dispersal patterns. Each of these factors is assessed separately for possible influence on the empirically determined sex and species differences. We predict the possible consequences of direct and inclusive fitness interactions on dispersal outcomes for future testing with genetic data. Components of Saimiri selective regimes particularly salient to female dispersal strategies include food competition, foraging benefits provided by kin and inbreeding avoidance. Dispersal patterns among male Saimiri are constrained by mate competition and the consequent reproductive skew, in addition to enhanced predation risk during dispersal forays. Little evidence, however, suggests that relative to familiar landscapes, exploitation of novel ranging areas substantially increases foraging costs or predation risk for dispersing squirrel monkeys of either sex. We then compare the species-specific dispersal regimes initially identified with the univariate array of proposed costs and benefits to the tradeoffs predicted by a selection of contemporary multivariate dispersal models. The multivariate models did not, however, improve substantially upon the collective insights on cost-benefit regimes achieved with the univariate hypotheses. Conclusions regarding the selective regimes structuring dispersal among squirrel monkeys are best considered provisional until genetic data become available allowing tests of our inferences concerning kin relationships and population structure of the study populations. In the end, this fine-grained analysis is consistent with contemporary understandings on the costs and benefits structuring dispersal strategies. Yet our findings provide an uncommonly clear demonstration that the outcome of the interaction of individual factors (food competition, mate competition, and inbreeding avoidance) depends in very subtle ways on the natural history of the organism. This text and two companion papers, II. Within-species and local variation and III. Cognition, comprise a monograph on the evolution and ecology of squirrel monkey dispersal patterns. Implications of the various results are relevant to resource and mate competition, inbreeding avoidance and kin-recognition, predation risk, coalition and alliance formation, cognitive capacities required for implementation of dispersal tactics, impacts of pre-Columbian anthropogenic disturbance on extant Neotropical biota, and conservation management, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses cognitive scientist Marc Hauser and an investigation of his research being conducted by Harvard University. The insights on animal cognition derived from Hauser's 30 years of research are discussed. Once-held notions of human uniqueness are said to have been diminished by Hauser's findings. Hauser also is noted for his work and written and public communications regarding morality and its evolutionary roots. Questions have been raised about many research papers coauthored by Hauser and a paper he coauthored in a 2002 issue of "Cognition" was retracted.

The author comments on an article by Neeltje J. Boogert et al about mate choice for cognitive traits in animals. She agrees with the point of the study authors that female choice for cognition will be hard to disentangle from choice for enhanced condition on the basis of correlated indicator traits. She mentions some predictions that arise if female evaluation of male displays is experience dependent. She also suggests that the paper should include studying why different females take different decisions.

Presents the authors' views about the comments on their paper "Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?" Information about the methodology used in the study; Remarks on the non-independence of ratings used in the original study; Information about a different method of data collection that avoids the non-independence issue; Comments on the results obtained by using the new method of data collection.