Self-handicapping in object play: how belugas (<i>Delphinapterus leucas</i>) make play difficult
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although observed in animals from various taxa, object play is not well studied. While studying object play in managed care belugas (Delphinapterus leucas), we noticed that, in some cases, the belugas self-handicap their play. For example, a beluga may push a ball onto a ledge, so that the object can only be reached by the beluga beaching itself. Self-handicapping has been described in locomotor and social play, but is rarely, if ever, reported in object play. The belugas of this study self-handicap themselves while playing with objects in 3.9% of cases. All nine of the immature belugas were observed to self-handicap, which accounted for 90.6% of the self-handicapping bouts observed. Even though rare, some degree of self-handicapping may be important in ensuring continued playfulness irrespective of the type of play involved. Broader comparative studies on the presence and role of self-handicapping across species and types of play are needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".