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