Dog-logic: inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use

Every 10 years, the IUCN World Parks Congress (WPC) brings together conservation experts from around the world to share information and ideas, and set a global policy agenda for protected areas. The 5th IUCN World Parks Congress was held in Durban, South Africa from September 8–17, 2004, and was attended by approximately 3,000 protected area experts, practitioners, and decision makers. The 5th WPC brought human–wildlife conflict (HWC) to the global stage as part of an effort to address current challenges facing protected area management and conservation. The HWC recommendation (included in this issue) was informed by a technical workshop that was part of the WPC proceedings. The workshop entitled “Creating Coexistence Between Humans and Wildlife: Global Perspectives on Local Efforts to Address Human-Wildlife Conflict” combined vigorous debate on human–wildlife conflict issues with a technical focus on useful outputs for those working in the profession. The workshop created “a unique opportunity to take stock [of the issues] ... provide an honest appraisal of progress and setbacks; and chart the course for protected areas over the next decade and beyond” (IUCN, 2003). This article summarizes recommendations from the workshop and introduces the other articles in this special issue of Human Dimensions of Wildlife. The articles that follow are written by presenters and participants of the “Creating

Peer-Reviewed Articles Creating Coexistence between Humans and Wildlife: Global Perspectives on Local Efforts to Address Human-Wildlife Conflict

We ascertained villagers’ perceptions about the importance of forests for their livelihoods and health through 1,837 reliably answered interviews of mostly male respondents from 185 villages in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo. Variation in these perceptions related to several environmental and social variables, as shown in classification and regression analyses. Overall patterns indicated that forest use and cultural values are highest among people on Borneo who live close to remaining forest, and especially among older Christian residents. Support for forest clearing depended strongly on the scale at which deforestation occurs. Deforestation for small-scale agriculture was generally considered to be positive because it directly benefits people’s welfare. Large-scale deforestation (e.g., for industrial oil palm or acacia plantations), on the other hand, appeared to be more context-dependent, with most respondents considering it to have overall negative impacts on them, but with people in some areas considering the benefits to outweigh the costs. The interviews indicated high awareness of negative environmental impacts of deforestation, with high levels of concern over higher temperatures, air pollution and loss of clean water sources. Our study is unique in its geographic and trans-national scale. Our findings enable the development of maps of forest use and perceptions that could inform land use planning at a range of scales. Incorporating perspectives such as these could significantly reduce conflict over forest resources and ultimately result in more equitable development processes.

People’s perceptions about the importance of forests on Borneo

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) perform above chance on invisible displacement tasks despite showing few other signs of possessing the necessary representational abilities. Four experiments investigated how dogs find an object that has been hidden in 1 of 3 opaque boxes. Dogs passed the task under a variety of control conditions, but only if the device used to displace the object ended up adjacent to the target box after the displacement. These results suggest that the search behavior of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of the object's past trajectory. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that on the same task, 18- and 24-month-old children showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or nonadjacent to the target box.

Do Dogs (Canis familiaris) Understand Invisible Displacement

Recently, there has been increasing attention to key intersections between sex, gender and autism (Lai et al., 2015), including the so-called ‘female autism phenotype’ (Mandy et al., 2012), social ‘camouflaging’ (Hull et al., 2017) and experiences of gender diversity in autistic people (van der Miesen et al., 2016). This research and related clinical practice have increased awareness of the breadth of autistic experience. However, sex and gender often have been conflated in this work, and gender viewed through a binary lens. The term ‘gender’ refers to a range of experiences, both internal and external (Becker et al., 2017; Ehrtmann et al., 2019), and the intricate interplay between social gender and inner gender-related experiences has yet to be articulated in autism (Cooper et al., 2018). In this editorial, written as a collaboration between clinician researchers and autistic advocates (Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019), we explore key topics in the field and offer recommendations for advancing this work through more diversified, sexand gender-informed lenses, and with a focus on the lived experiences of autistic people.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1362361320913192

Both sex- and gender-related factors should be considered in autism research and clinical practice.

It is generally recognized that there are gender-related differences in children’s toy preferences. However, the magnitude of these differences has not been firmly established. Furthermore, not all studies of gender-related toy preferences find significant gender differences. These inconsistent findings could result from using different toys or methods to measure toy preferences or from studying children of different ages. Our systematic review and meta-analysis combined 113 effect sizes from 75 studies to estimate the magnitude of gender-related differences in toy preferences. We also assessed the impact of using different toys or methods to assess these differences, as well as the effect of age on gender-related toy preferences. Boys preferred boy-related toys more than girls did, and girls preferred girl-related toys more than boys did. These differences were large (d ≥ 1.60). Girls also preferred toys that researchers classified as neutral more than boys did (d = 0.29). Preferences for gender-typical over gender-atypical toys were also large and significant (d ≥ 1.20), and girls and boys showed gender-related differences of similar magnitude. When only dolls and vehicles were considered, within-sex differences were even larger and of comparable size for boys and girls. Researchers sometimes misclassified toys, perhaps contributing to an apparent gender difference in preference for neutral toys. Forced choice methods produced larger gender-related differences than other methods, and gender-related differences increased with age.

/pdf/how-large-are-gender-differences-in-toy-preferences-a-jz46n2dm0y.pdf

How Large Are Gender Differences in Toy Preferences? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Toy Preference Research

Preferences for pink and blue were tested in children aged 4-11 years in three small-scale societies: Shipibo villages in the Peruvian Amazon, kastom villages in the highlands of Tanna Island, Vanuatu, and BaYaka foragers in the northern Republic of Congo; and compared to children from an Australian global city (total N = 232). No sex differences were found in preference for pink in any of the three societies not influenced by global culture (ds - 0.31-0.23), in contrast to a female preference for pink in the global city (d = 1.24). Results suggest that the pairing of female and pink is a cultural phenomenon and is not driven by an essential preference for pink in girls.

/pdf/cultural-components-of-sex-differences-in-color-preference-5fc5z1605w.pdf

Cultural components of sex differences in color preference

Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) understand invisible displacement

Human-wildlife conflict is a major threat to survival and viability of many native animal species worldwide. Successful management of this conflict requires evidence-based understanding of the complex system of factors that motivate and facilitate it. However, for many affected species, data on this sensitive subject are too sparse for many statistical techniques. This study considers two iconic wild cats under threat in diverse locations and employs a Bayesian Network approach to integrate expert-elicited information into a probabilistic model of the factors affecting human-wildlife conflict. The two species considered are cheetahs in Botswana and jaguars in the Peruvian Amazon. Results of the individual network models are presented and the relative importance of different conservation management strategies are presented and discussed. The study highlights the strengths of the Bayesian Network approach for quantitatively describing complex, data-poor real world systems.

Jac T. M. Davis

Papers

How Large Are Gender Differences in Toy Preferences? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Toy Preference Research

Cultural components of sex differences in color preference

Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) understand invisible displacement

Bayesian Networks for Understanding Human-Wildlife Conflict in Conservation

Gender differences in children’s play: A systematic review and meta-analysis