vendredi 7 décembre 2018

Deux offres de stage de M2

Deux stages de M2 sont à pourvoir pour le premier semestre 2019 (voir détail en pièce jointe), au laboratoire de Prof. Claude Tomberg, Faculté de Médecine, Université de Bruxelles, Belgique. Ces stages ne sont pas gratifiés. Cependant, il existe des bourses types Erasmus pour les stages à l'étranger. Les étudiants peuvent également bénéficier d’un tarif avantageux pour leur logement (ils sont libres de choisir leur logement mais le laboratoire leur offre cette opportunité s’ils le souhaitent). 

Study of the self and the other in social heterospecific cognition in horses: study of the sensitivity of the horse to the body orientation and the faces of others when using visual signals

Horses appear to be sensitive human attentional states (Proops & Mc Comb, 2010) and able to read human bodily attentional signals including body and head orientation and subtle eye cues (Proops and McComb 2010, Krueger et al. 2011; Maros et al. 2008; Sankey et al. 2011).
Yet little is known how far horses are using these attentional cues to adapt their behavior. A recent study (Ringhofer M. & Yamamoto, S, 2017) suggest that horses alter their communicative behaviour towards humans in accordance with humans’ knowledge state suggesting that horses possess some cognitive basis for this ability of understanding others’ knowledge state in social communication with humans.
Moreover, how horses understand what humans see or not is yet unclear (the visual field of humans and horses are quite different).
In this study we aim at investigating how horses adapt their communicative behavior to the attentional state of humans.
The items will be:
·       Identify the communicative cues of the horses (body language, mimicking) for asking for food they cannot reach by themselves
·       Validate/invalidate the intentional content of theses communicative signals
·       Investigate if horses adapt their communicative behavior to human attentional state
·       How horses understand what humans see or not
·       Recording event-related potentials in horses to track neural correlates of conscious perception
The research will be conducted at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Faculty of Medecine with the collaboration of the Haras du Chaimont (1460 Ittre, Belgique).
 The first part of the study has been done (data acquisition and screening of behaviors) but the deep analysis of the data needs to be complete. Therefore, an opportunity to contribute to this research and its developments is offered for two research students in Master 2 in fields related to cognitive sciences (ethology, psychology, neurosciences etc…) wishing to experience 6 months in research process.
Contact: Prof. Claude Tomberg, Faculty of Medecine, University of Brussels, Belgium
    ctomberg@ulb.ac.be
Date: First semester 2019