Background In the dot perspective taking task – a task commonly used to assess implicit mentalizing - participants are typically slower in judging how many dots they see when there is a difference in the number of dots seen by themselves and a centrally placed avatar than when both perspectives align. This finding has been termed the ‘altercentric interference’ effect and taken as evidence that participants spontaneously and automatically compute the avatar’s perspective. In this study, we focus on one line of critiques regarding the interpretation that the altercentric interference effect is automatic, namely by assessing whether the effect is purely stimulus-driven. Specifically, we tested the proposal that for the altercentric interference effect to emerge, participants must first focus their attention to the avatar, which then directs their attention to the dots and that this is achieved by a social word prompt (typically ‘YOU’) inducing a social mindset that then draws the participants’ attention to the avatar once the avatar and the dots appear. Methods We tested two groups of participants: one with a ‘YOU’ prompt and one with a non-social ‘NOW’ prompt. The semantics of both prompts were irrelevant because information about the colour of the dots participants needed to judge was presented through the ink colour of the prompt, not its text. Results Our results revealed no statistically significant difference in the altercentric interference effect between groups and our exploratory analyses showed that this was due to the altercentric interference effect being present in both groups. Conclusions Our findings do not provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the word prompt used in typical dot perspective tasking tasks promotes a social mindset that leads to the altercentric interference effect, however they may be aligned with the hypothesis that the effect requires participants’ attention to be drawn to the avatar.

Like other domesticated species, most notably dogs, horses have been reported to follow human gestures and successfully use them to gain rewards in an object choice task. Empirical support for the hypothesis that a domain-general mechanism may underlie this ability comes from studies in which horses have successfully solved the task by using not just a human pointing gesture but also an arbitrary physical cue, namely a wooden marker. Here, we replicated the two conditions in which these two cues were used by Proops et al. (2010) with two critical changes: first, we positioned the marker out of the horses' sight, and second, we positioned the marker such that it was in the same position where the gesture would be when the experimenter showed the pointing gesture. Horses successfully solved the task using both the pointing gesture and the marker, and their performance did not differ statistically significantly between these two conditions. The robustness of this result was corroborated by complementary model comparisons, which further showed that the horses' performance was not significantly influenced by their age or sex. Our findings thus support the consistency of previously reported findings in these specific testing conditions and suggest that at least part of the horses' ability to solve the object choice task with different types of cues is based on a domain-general mechanism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The Temporal Doppler Effect refers to the subjective perception that the past is further away than the future even when both temporal distances are objectively the same from the present moment (Caruso et al., 2013). In the current study

disciplines and research areas that rely on participants’ self-reports to accrue data on participants’ true preferences are faced with the

How statistically non-significant results are reported and interpreted following null hypothesis significance testing is often criticized. This issue is important for animal cognition research because studies in the field are often underpowered to detect theoretically meaningful effect sizes, i.e., often produce non-significant p-values even when the null hypothesis is incorrect. Thus, we manually extracted and classified how researchers report and interpret non-significant p-values and examined the p-value distribution of these non-significant results across published articles in animal cognition and related fields. We found a large amount of heterogeneity in how researchers report statistically non-significant p-values in the result sections of articles, and how they interpret them in the titles and abstracts. Reporting of the non-significant results as “No Effect” was common in the titles (84%), abstracts (64%), and results sections (41%) of papers, whereas reporting of the results as “Non-Significant” was less common in the titles (0%) and abstracts (26%), but was present in the results (52%). Discussions of effect sizes were rare (<5% of articles). A p-value distribution analysis was consistent with research being performed with low power of statistical tests to detect effect sizes of interest. These findings suggest that researchers in animal cognition should pay close attention to the evidence used to support claims of absence of effects in the literature, and—in their own work—report statistically non-significant results clearly and formally correct, as well as use more formal methods of assessing evidence against theoretical predictions.

Null Hypothesis Significance Testing is a statistical procedure widely used in cognitive development research. There is widespread concern that the results of this statistical procedure are misinterpreted and lead to unsubstantiated claims about studies’ outcomes. Two particularly pertinent issues for research on cognitive development are: i) treating a non-significant result as evidence of no difference or no effect, and ii) treating a non-significant result in one group/condition and a significant result in another as evidence of a difference between groups/conditions. The current study focuses on quantifying the extent to which these two issues can be observed in the published literature on cognitive development. To this end, we will systematically search for empirical studies investigating cognitive development in 0-to-16-year-old children that have been published at two time points, namely in 1999 and 2019. For each of the two issues, we will extract information from 300 published articles, 150 per publication year.

Scholastic factors (academic achievement) are hypothesized to be important determinants of health-related behaviors in adolescents, but there is a lack of knowledge on their influence on physical activity levels (PAL), especially considering the COVID-19 pandemic and the imposed lockdown. This study aimed to investigate the associations between scholastic factors and PAL before and during the pandemic lockdown. The participants were adolescents form Bosnia and Herzegovina (n = 525, 46% females), who were observed prospectively at the baseline (before the pandemic lockdown) and during the lockdown in 2020 (follow-up). The scholastic factors (grade point average, behavioral grade, school absences, unexcused absences) were evidenced at the baseline (predictors). The outcome (PAL) was evaluated using the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Adolescents at the baseline and the follow-up. Gender, age, parental/familial conflict, and sport participation were observed as confounders. No significant influence of the predictors on PAL were evidenced at the baseline or at the follow-up. The scholastic variables were significantly associated with the changes of PAL which occurred due to pandemic lockdown, with a lower risk for negative changes in PAL among adolescents who were better in school (OR = 0.56, 95%CI: 0.34–0.81, and OR = 0.66, 95%CI: 0.34–0.97, for the grade point average and behavioral grade, respectively). Students who do well in school are probably more aware of the health benefits of proper PAL, and therefore are devoted to the maintenance of their PAL even during the home-confinement of lockdown. Public health authorities should focus more on helping adolescents to understand the importance and benefits of proper PAL throughout the school system.

Eurasian jays have been reported to protect their caches by responding to cues about either the visual perspective or current desire of an observing conspecific, similarly to other corvids. Here, we used established paradigms to test whether these birds can – like humans – integrate multiple cues about different mental states and perform an optimal response accordingly. Across five experiments, which also include replications of previous work, we found little evidence that our jays adjusted their caching behaviour in line with the visual perspective and current desire of another agent, neither by integrating these social cues nor by responding to only one type of cue independently. These results raise questions about the reliability of the previously reported effects and highlight several key issues affecting reliability in comparative cognition research.

To promote collaboration across canine science, address reproducibility issues, and advance open science practices within animal cognition, we have launched the ManyDogs consortium, modeled on similar ManyX projects in other fields. We aimed to create a collaborative network that (a) uses large, diverse samples to investigate and replicate findings, (b) promotes open science practices of preregistering hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans, (c) investigates the influence of differences across populations and breeds, and (d) examines how different research methods and testing environments influence the robustness of results. Our first study combines a phenomenon that appears to be highly robust, dogs’ ability to follow human pointing, with a question that remains controversial: do dogs interpret pointing as an informative gesture, as an imperative command, or as a simple associative cue? We collected preliminary data (N = 61) from a single laboratory on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice task: (1) Ostensive (experimenter pointed to a baited cup after making eye-contact and saying the dog’s name); (2) Non-ostensive (experimenter pointed to a baited cup without making eye-contact or saying the dog’s name). Dogs followed the ostensive point, but not the non-ostensive point, significantly more often than expected by chance. Preliminary results also provided suggestive evidence for variability in point-following across dog breeds. The next phase is the global participation stage of the project. We propose to replicate this protocol in a large and diverse sample of research sites, simultaneously assessing replicability between labs and further investigating the question of dogs’ point-following comprehension.