Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity

Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity

Cooperation by generalised reciprocity implies that individuals apply the decision rule "help anyone if helped by someone". This mechanism has been shown to generate evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation, but as yet it is unclear how widely this cooperation mechanism is applied among animals. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are highly social animals with considerable cognitive potential and the a...

Learning to cooperate via indirect reciprocity

Give Me Another One!

We investigate the complexity of an optimization problem in Boolean propositional logic related to information theory: Given a conjunctive formula over a set of relations, find a satisfying assignment with minimal Hamming distance to a given assignment that satisfies the formula (NearestOtherSolution, NOSol). We present a complete classification with respect to the relations admitted in the for...

Cohabiting family members share microbiota with one another and with their dogs

Human-associated microbial communities vary across individuals: possible contributing factors include (genetic) relatedness, diet, and age. However, our surroundings, including individuals with whom we interact, also likely shape our microbial communities. To quantify this microbial exchange, we surveyed fecal, oral, and skin microbiota from 60 families (spousal units with children, dogs, both,...

Transfer of training from one working memory task to another: behavioural and neural evidence

N-back working memory (WM) tasks necessitate the maintenance and updating of dynamic rehearsal sets during performance. The delayed matching-to-sample (dMTS) task is another WM task, which in turn involves the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval of stimulus representations in sequential order. Because both n-back and dMTS engage WM function, we hypothesized that compared to a control task not ...