Animal Cognition Papers I've Found Interesting

Hello! This is my first time making a blog post on here and I'm doing it from my phone so sorry if it looks bad! xc

Since I don't have a lot else interesting going on at the moment, I thought I'd show a few research papers in the Animal Cognition journal that I've read recently and found to be pretty cool. Maybe people in the comments can share some papers they find interesting? That'd be awesome. :]

First up is Perception of optical illusions in ungulates: insights from goats, sheep, guanacos and llamas by Berardo et al. The entire concept of showing goats optical illusions is fantastic, but I feel that they really elevated it to the next level by including llamas. I think perhaps my favourite fact about this one is that they modified the Müller-Lyer illusion by replacing the lines with carrots... so that the goats would eat the carrot they thought was bigger. It's somewhat surprising that a goat would even have the mental capacity to distinguish between “long” and “short”, but the results support it so who am I to say?

Next up is No evidence tube entrapment distresses rodents in typical empathy tests by Nugroho et al., and it is exactly what it sounds like. They just... put some rats and hamsters in a tube and waited to see if they'd become averse to it. (They didn't, even after enclosure for up to fifteen minutes! They're just chilling in there.) This makes sense to me - hamsters are burrowing animals after all, and it wouldn't make sense for either them or rats to be afraid of the tube. They love the tube.

Finally there's Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) create facial displays during social interactions by changing the shape of their melons by Richard et al. This one was chosen for a rather childish reason - I think beluga heads are funny. And the idea that they use those funny heads when talking? Even funnier.

So yeah! I guess that's it.