Membership
Daniel Mills
Jonathan Cooper
Severine Ligout
Sarah Ellis
Sarah Redgate
Hannah Wright
Anaïs Racca
Background
The animal behaviour, cognition and welfare group has made an
international contribution to improving the lives of captive
animals and contributed significant advances to our
understanding of the biology these species. Our work extends
from the fundamental, e.g. processes affecting resource choice,
the perceptual and learning abilities of various species,
psychobiological basis of temperament traits, to the applied
e.g. clinical and field evaluation of new products aimed at
improving the behaviour and welfare of captive animals. Our
research outputs since 2001 include authored and edited text
books and chapters and over 100 other scientific publications
(see individual staff lists).
Facilities
We are supported by outstanding research facilities including:
• Animal behaviour clinic
• Animal cognition laboratory
• Analytical laboratories
•
Equestrian centre
•
Small Animal Unit
Specific research interests
Sensitivity to facial communication in humans
and dogs
As
the face and facial expressions are fundamental stimuli in human
non-verbal communication, it might be expected that the domestic
dog could also have a high sensitivity to human’s faces and
even, following the convergent cognitive evolution hypothesis,
manifest a human-like face processing strategy toward human’s
faces.
(more details)
And work alongside colleagues in the Reproduction & Biodiversity Research Group, in addition to regularly hosting collaborative researchers from both the UK and overseas