|
 |
 |
The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgamesEARTHDATE: May 1, 2011
|
REAL LIFE NEWS: FEMALE DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN MALESby HazedYes, it's true - women are smarter than men. At least they are in the doggy kingdom. Brain differences between male and female dogs appear to give the females an advantage in one particular task which is considered significant in terms of understanding the world around you. Corsin Mullet, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, explained that her team found the difference when they were testing dogs to see if they understand a concept called "object permanence". This is the realization that when objects move out of sight, they do not vanish completely or change their form. Children figure this one out at about one years old, and the team wanted to know whether dogs could grasp it too. So they devised an experiment in which blue tennis balls disappeared behind a wooden board and then reappeared. There were four scenarios which the dogs watched:
If you understand object permanence then scenarios one and two are what you would expect to happen, but with three and four clearly something's up. So the question was, would the dogs react differently to the unexpected scenarios? The researchers could tell how the dogs reacted by seeing how long they looked at the emerging ball. "If something unexpected or, say, impossible is to happen, children and animals will look longer at the event," Muller said. Looking at the results, at first it seemed as though the dogs did look longer when the ball seemed to grow or shrink mysteriously. But when the researchers broke the results down by the sex of the dog, they found that the boy dogs hadn't noticed anything odd, and the female dogs stared at the unexpected conditions for a lot longer than the expected ones. This sex difference was apparent across breeds, from large to small, purebred to mongrels. Fascinating! Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42786171/ns/health-pet_health/# |
 |
 |
