Some humans might prefer to read the entirety of this study, rather than see any summary that we or anyone else would provide: “Monkeys Prefer Reality Television,” Eliza Bliss-Moreau [pictured below], Anthony C. Santistevan, and Christopher J. Machad, PsyAxXiv, DOI 10.31234/osf.io/7drpt, 2021. The authors are at the University of California Davis; Flatiron Health, Inc., New […]
Tag: monkey
Monkeys and the Uncanny Valley [study]
“The concept of the uncanny valley suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.” Source: Wikipedia Since its discovery in 1970, many follow-up studies have confirmed the effect in human observers. But what about other animals, say, monkeys? Are they also […]
When a monkey loved a deer…
Love has always been difficult to define exactly. A newly published study adds nuance, or at least data, to the concept. The study is: “Interspecies sexual behaviour between a male Japanese macaque and female sika deer,” Marie Pelé, Alexandre Bonnefoy, Masaki Shimada, and Cédric Sueur, Primates, epub January 2017. The authors, in Strasbourg, France and […]
The classic shoot-the-monkey demonstration, anew
Daniel Rosenberg (whom you will see in the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony next month) and his colleagues at the Harvard Science Center staged and shot (anew!) this brief video of a classic physics demo: This is a demonstration of the independence of the horizontal and vertical components of the velocity of a projectile. Often referred […]
