Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters.
A method used to test ToM in human children has been adapted for testing non-human animals. The basis of the test is to track the gaze of the animal. One human hides an object in view of a second human who then leaves the room. The object is then removed. [14]
Function: To discourage inbreeding, which decreases the number of viable offspring. Phylogeny: Found in a number of mammalian species, suggesting initial evolution tens of millions of years ago. Mechanism: Little is known about the neuromechanism.
Recently, most non-human theory of mind research has focused on monkeys and great apes, who are of most interest in the study of the evolution of human social cognition. Research can be categorized in to three subsections of theory of mind: attribution of intentions, attribution of knowledge (and perception), and attribution of belief.
Chimpanzees are also the only non-human species shown to demonstrate a hierarchical structure of personality, with two dimensions of affect corresponding to negative and positive emotionality, and a third dimension of disinhibition (vs. constraint), which is thought to comprise a regulatory system that is known to play a role in the perception ...
Darwin explores the biological aspects of emotional behaviour and the animal origins of human characteristics like smiling and frowning, shrugging shoulders, lifting eyebrows in surprise, and baring teeth in an angry sneer. A German translation of Expression appeared in 1872, and Dutch and French versions followed in 1873 and 1874.
Konrad Lorenz had examined the phenomenon of "imprinting" and felt that it might have some parallels to human attachment. Imprinting, a behavior characteristic of some birds and a very few mammals, involves rapid learning of recognition by a young bird or animal exposed to a conspecific or an object or organism that behaves suitably.
The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research. In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behavior to some non-primate species, including parrots and great spotted woodpeckers.