Ákos Pogány

Discussion In Study 1, we investigated the effect of interacting with goats on short-term changes in human well-being under field conditions. In Study 2, our aim was to compare the additional psychological benefits associated with taking care of goats as opposed to walking in a botanical garden. In both situations, participants were outdoors and performed mild physical activity.

Abstract We investigated the spontaneous tendency of dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human, in the absence of food reward. Based on dogs’ inherent sociality and domestication history, we predicted that the tendency to match human actions is more pronounced in this species than in the other two. To test this, we exposed N = 42 dog puppies, N = 39 kittens and N = 8 wolf pups to ostensive human demonstrations of an object-related action.