title: Animal cognition

text: The work of Thorndike, Pavlov and a little later of the outspoken behaviorist John B. Watson set the direction of much research on animal behavior for more than half a century. During this time there was considerable progress in understanding simple associations; notably, around 1930 the differences between Thorndike's instrumental (or operant) conditioning and Pavlov's classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning were clarified, first by Miller and Kanorski, and then by B. F. Skinner. Many experiments on conditioning followed; they generated some complex theories, but they made little or no reference to intervening mental processes. Probably the most explicit dismissal of the idea that mental processes control behavior was the radical behaviorism of Skinner. This view seeks to explain behavior, including "private events" like mental images, solely by reference to the environmental contingencies impinging on the human or animal.


title: Animal cognition

text: Despite the predominantly behaviorist orientation of research before 1960, the rejection of mental processes in animals was not universal during those years. Influential exceptions included, for example, Wolfgang Köhler and his insightful chimpanzees and Edward Tolman whose proposed cognitive map was a significant contribution to subsequent cognitive research in both humans and animals.


title: Animal cognition

text: Beginning around 1960, a "cognitive revolution" in research on humans gradually spurred a similar transformation of research with animals. Inference to processes not directly observable became acceptable and then commonplace. An important proponent of this shift in thinking was Donald O. Hebb, who argued that "mind" is simply a name for processes in the head that control complex behavior, and that it is both necessary and possible to infer those processes from behavior. Animals came to be seen as "goal seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity".


title: Animal cognition

text: The acceleration of research on animal cognition in the last 50 years or so has led to a rapid expansion in the variety of species studied and methods employed. The remarkable behavior of large-brained animals such as primates and cetacea have claimed special attention, but all sorts of animals large and small (birds, fish, ants, bees, and others) have been brought into the laboratory or observed in carefully controlled field studies. In the laboratory, animals push levers, pull strings, dig for food, swim in water mazes, or respond to images on computer screens to get information for discrimination, attention, memory, and categorization experiments. Careful field studies explore memory for food caches, navigation by stars, communication, tool use, identification of conspecifics, and many other matters. Studies often focus on the behavior of animals in their natural environments and discuss the putative function of the behavior for the propagation and survival of the species. These developments reflect an increased cross-fertilization from related fields such as ethology and behavioral ecology. Contributions from behavioral neuroscience are beginning to clarify the physiological substrate of some inferred mental process.


title: Animal cognition

text: Some researchers have made effective use of a Piagetian methodology, taking tasks which human children are known to master at different stages of development and investigating which of them can be performed by particular species. Others have been inspired by concerns for animal welfare and the management of domestic species; for example, Temple Grandin has harnessed her unique expertise in animal welfare and the ethical treatment of farm livestock to highlight underlying similarities between humans and other animals. From a methodological point of view, one of the main risks in this sort of work is anthropomorphism, the tendency to interpret an animal's behavior in terms of human feelings, thoughts, and motivations.


title: Animal cognition

text: Human and non-human animal cognition have much in common, and this is reflected in the research summarized below; most of the headings found here might also appear in an article on human cognition. Of course, research in the two also differs in important respects. Notably, much research with humans either studies or involves language, and much research with animals is related directly or indirectly to behaviors important to survival in natural settings. Following are summaries of some of the major areas of research in animal cognition.


title: Animal cognition

text: Animals process information from eyes, ears, and other sensory organs to perceive the environment. Perceptual processes have been studied in many species, with results that are often similar to those in humans. Equally interesting are those perceptual processes that differ from, or go beyond those found in humans, such as echolocation in bats and dolphins, motion detection by skin receptors in fish, and extraordinary visual acuity, motion sensitivity and ability to see ultraviolet light in some birds.


title: Animal cognition

text: Much of what is happening in the world at any moment is irrelevant to current behavior. Attention refers to mental processes that select relevant information, inhibit irrelevant information, and switch among these as the situation demands. Often the selective process is tuned before relevant information appears; such expectation makes for rapid selection of key stimuli when they become available. A large body of research has explored the way attention and expectation affect the behavior of non-human animals, and much of this work suggests that attention operates in birds, mammals and reptiles in much the same way that it does in humans.


title: Animal cognition

text: Animals trained to discriminate between two stimuli, say black versus white, can be said to attend to the "brightness dimension," but this says little about whether this dimension is selected in preference to others. More enlightenment comes from experiments that allow the animal to choose from several alternatives. For example, several studies have shown that performance is better on, for example, a color discrimination (e.g. blue vs green) after the animal has learned another color discrimination (e.g. red vs orange) than it is after training on a different dimension such as an X shape versus an O shape. The reverse effect happens after training on forms. Thus, the earlier learning appears to affect which dimension, color or form, the animal will attend to.


title: Animal cognition

text: Other experiments have shown that after animals have learned to respond to one aspect of the environment responsiveness to other aspects is suppressed. In "blocking", for example, an animal is conditioned to respond to one stimulus ("A") by pairing that stimulus with reward or punishment. After the animal responds consistently to A, a second stimulus ("B") accompanies A on additional training trials. Later tests with the B stimulus alone elicit little response, suggesting that learning about B has been blocked by prior learning about A. This result supports the hypothesis that stimuli are neglected if they fail to provide new information. Thus, in the experiment just cited, the animal failed to attend to B because B added no information to that supplied by A. If true, this interpretation is an important insight into attentional processing, but this conclusion remains uncertain because blocking and several related phenomena can be explained by models of conditioning that do not invoke attention.


title: Animal cognition

text: Attention is a limited resource and is not a none-or-all response: the more attention devoted to one aspect of the environment, the less is available for others. A number of experiments have studied this in animals. In one experiment, a tone and a light are presented simultaneously to pigeons. The pigeons gain a reward only by choosing the correct combination of the two stimuli (e.g. a high frequency tone together with a yellow light). The birds perform well at this task, presumably by dividing attention between the two stimuli. When only one of the stimuli varies and the other is presented at its rewarded value, discrimination improves on the variable stimulus but discrimination on the alternative stimulus worsens. These outcomes are consistent with the notion that attention is a limited resource that can be more or less focused among incoming stimuli.


title: Animal cognition

text: As noted above, the function of attention is to select information that is of special use to the animal. Visual search typically calls for this sort of selection, and search tasks have been used extensively in both humans and animals to determine the characteristics of attentional selection and the factors that control it.


title: Animal cognition

text: Experimental research on visual search in animals was initially prompted by field observations published by Luc Tinbergen (1960). Tinbergen observed that birds are selective when foraging for insects. For example, he found that birds tended to catch the same type of insect repeatedly even though several types were available. Tinbergen suggested that this prey selection was caused by an attentional bias that improved detection of one type of insect while suppressing detection of others. This "attentional priming" is commonly said to result from a pretrial activation of a mental representation of the attended object, which Tinbergen called a "searching image".


title: Animal cognition

text: Tinbergen's field observations on priming have been supported by a number of experiments. For example, Pietrewicz and Kamil (1977, 1979) presented blue jays with pictures of tree trunks upon which rested either a moth of species A, a moth of species B, or no moth at all. The birds were rewarded for pecks at a picture showing a moth. Crucially, the probability with which a particular species of moth was detected was higher after repeated trials with that species (e.g. A, A, A...) than it was after a mixture of trials (e.g. A, B, B, A, B, A, A...). These results suggest again that sequential encounters with an object can establish an attentional predisposition to see the object.


title: Animal cognition

text: Another way to produce attentional priming in search is to provide an advance signal that is associated with the target. For example, if a person hears a song sparrow he or she may be predisposed to detect a song sparrow in a shrub, or among other birds. A number of experiments have reproduced this effect in animal subjects.


title: Animal cognition

text: Still other experiments have explored nature of stimulus factors that affect the speed and accuracy of visual search. For example, the time taken to find a single target increases as the number of items in the visual field increases. This rise in RT is steep if the distracters are similar to the target, less steep if they are dissimilar, and may not occur if the distracters are very different from the target in form or color.


title: Animal cognition

text: Fundamental but difficult to define, the concept of "concept" was discussed for hundreds of years by philosophers before it became a focus of psychological study. Concepts enable humans and animals to organize the world into functional groups; the groups may be composed of perceptually similar objects or events, diverse things that have a common function, relationships such as same versus different, or relations among relations such as analogies. Extensive discussions on these matters together with many references may be found in Shettleworth (2010) Wasserman and Zentall (2006) and in Zentall "et al." (2008). The latter is freely available online.


title: Animal cognition

text: Most work on animal concepts has been done with visual stimuli, which can easily be constructed and presented in great variety, but auditory and other stimuli have been used as well. Pigeons have been widely used, for they have excellent vision and are readily conditioned to respond to visual targets; other birds and a number of other animals have been studied as well.


title: Animal cognition

text: In a typical experiment, a bird or other animal confronts a computer monitor on which a large number of pictures appear one by one, and the subject gets a reward for pecking or touching a picture of a category item and no reward for non-category items. Alternatively, a subject may be offered a choice between two or more pictures. Many experiments end with the presentation of items never seen before; successful sorting of these items shows that the animal has not simply learned many specific stimulus-response associations. A related method, sometimes used to study relational concepts, is matching-to-sample. In this task an animal sees one stimulus and then chooses between two or more alternatives, one of which is the same as the first; the animal is then rewarded for choosing the matching stimulus.


title: Animal cognition

text: Perceptual categorization is said to occur when a person or animal responds in a similar way to a range of stimuli that share common features. For example, a squirrel climbs a tree when it sees Rex, Shep, or Trixie, which suggests that it categorizes all three as something to avoid. This sorting of instances into groups is crucial to survival. Among other things, an animal must categorize if it is to apply learning about one object (e.g. Rex bit me) to new instances of that category (dogs may bite).


title: Animal cognition

text: Many animals readily classify objects by perceived differences in form or color. For example, bees or pigeons quickly learn to choose any red object and reject any green object if red leads to reward and green does not. Seemingly much more difficult is an animal's ability to categorize natural objects that vary a great deal in color and form even while belonging to the same group. In a classic study, Richard J. Herrnstein trained pigeons to respond to the presence or absence of human beings in photographs. The birds readily learned to peck photos that contained partial or full views of humans and to avoid pecking photos with no human, despite great differences in the form, size, and color of both the humans displayed and in the non-human pictures. In follow-up studies, pigeons categorized other natural objects (e.g. trees) and after training they were able without reward to sort photos they had not seen before . Similar work has been done with natural auditory categories, for example, bird songs. Honeybees ("Apis mellifera") are able to form concepts of "up" and "down".


title: Animal cognition

text: Perceptually unrelated stimuli may come to be responded to as members of a class if they have a common use or lead to common consequences. An oft-cited study by Vaughan (1988) provides an example. Vaughan divided a large set of unrelated pictures into two arbitrary sets, A and B. Pigeons got food for pecking at pictures in set A but not for pecks at pictures in set B. After they had learned this task fairly well, the outcome was reversed: items in set B led to food and items in set A did not. Then the outcome was reversed again, and then again, and so on. Vaughan found that after 20 or more reversals, associating a reward with a few pictures in one set caused the birds to respond to the other pictures in that set without further reward as if they were thinking "if these pictures in set A bring food, the others in set A must also bring food." That is, the birds now categorized the pictures in each set as functionally equivalent. Several other procedures have yielded similar results.


title: Animal cognition

text: When tested in a simple stimulus matching-to-sample task (described above) many animals readily learn specific item combinations, such as "touch red if the sample is red, touch green if the sample is green." But this does not demonstrate that they distinguish between "same" and "different" as general concepts. Better evidence is provided if, after training, an animal successfully makes a choice that matches a novel sample that it has never seen before. Monkeys and chimpanzees do learn to do this, as do pigeons if they are given a great deal of practice with many different stimuli. However, because the sample is presented first, successful matching might mean that the animal is simply choosing the most recently seen "familiar" item rather than the conceptually "same" item. A number of studies have attempted to distinguish these possibilities, with mixed results.


title: Animal cognition

text: The use of rules has sometimes been considered an ability restricted to humans, but a number of experiments have shown evidence of simple rule learning in primates and also in other animals. Much of the evidence has come from studies of sequence learning in which the "rule" consists of the order in which a series of events occurs. Rule use is shown if the animal learns to discriminate different orders of events and transfers this discrimination to new events arranged in the same order. For example, Murphy "et al." (2008) trained rats to discriminate between visual sequences. For one group ABA and BAB were rewarded, where A="bright light" and B="dim light". Other stimulus triplets were not rewarded. The rats learned the visual sequence, although both bright and dim lights were equally associated with reward. More importantly, in a second experiment with auditory stimuli, rats responded correctly to sequences of novel stimuli that were arranged in the same order as those previously learned. Similar sequence learning has been demonstrated in birds and other animals as well.


title: Animal cognition

text: The categories that have been developed to analyze human memory (short term memory, long term memory, working memory) have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory (e.g. the serial position effect) have been detected in animals, particularly monkeys. However most progress has been made in the analysis of spatial memory; some of this work has sought to clarify the physiological basis of spatial memory and the role of the hippocampus; other work has explored the spatial memory of scatter-hoarder animals such as Clark's nutcracker, certain jays, tits and certain squirrels, whose ecological niches require them to remember the locations of thousands of caches, often following radical changes in the environment.


title: Animal cognition

text: Memory has been widely investigated in foraging honeybees, "Apis mellifera", which use both transient short-term working memory that is non-feeder specific and a feeder specific


title: Animal cognition

text: long-term reference memory. Memory induced in a free-flying honeybee by a single learning trial lasts for days and, by three learning trials, for a lifetime. "Bombus terrestris audax" workers vary in their effort investment towards memorising flower locations, with smaller workers less "able" to be selective and thus less "interested" in which flowers are richer sugar sources. Meanwhile, bigger "B. t. audax" workers have more carrying capacity and thus more reason to memorise that information, and so they do. Slugs, "Limax flavus", have a short-term memory of approximately 1 min and long-term memory of 1 month.


title: Animal cognition

text: As in humans, research with animals distinguishes between "working" or "short-term" memory from "reference" or long-term memory. Tests of working memory evaluate memory for events that happened in the recent past, usually within the last few seconds or minutes. Tests of reference memory evaluate memory for regularities such as "pressing a lever brings food" or "children give me peanuts".


title: Animal cognition

text: This is one of the simplest tests for memory spanning a short time interval. The test compares an animal's response to a stimulus or event on one occasion to its response on a previous occasion. If the second response differs consistently from the first, the animal must have remembered something about the first, unless some other factor such as motivation, sensory sensitivity, or the test stimulus has changed.


title: Animal cognition

text: Delayed response tasks are often used to study short-term memory in animals. Introduced by Hunter (1913), a typical delayed response task presents an animal with a stimulus such a colored light, and after a short time interval the animal chooses among alternatives that match the stimulus, or are related to the stimulus in some other way. In Hunter's studies, for example, a light appeared briefly in one of three goal boxes and then later the animal chose among the boxes, finding food behind the one that had been lighted. Most research has been done with some variation of the "delayed matching-to-sample" task. For example, in the initial study with this task, a pigeon was presented with a flickering or steady light. Then, a few seconds later, two pecking keys were illuminated, one with a steady light and one with a flickering light. The bird got food if it pecked the key that matched the original stimulus.


title: Animal cognition

text: A commonly-used variation of the matching-to-sample task requires the animal to use the initial stimulus to control a later choice between different stimuli. For example, if the initial stimulus is a black circle, the animal learns to choose "red" after the delay; if it is a black square, the correct choice is "green". Ingenious variations of this method have been used to explore many aspects of memory, including forgetting due to interference and memory for multiple items.


title: Animal cognition

text: The radial arm maze is used to test memory for spatial location and to determine the mental processes by which location is determined. In a radial maze test, an animal is placed on a small platform from which paths lead in various directions to goal boxes; the animal finds food in one or more goal boxes. Having found food in a box, the animal must return to the central platform. The maze may be used to test both reference and working memory. Suppose, for example, that over a number of sessions the same 4 arms of an 8-arm maze always lead to food. If in a later test session the animal goes to a box that has never been baited, this indicates a failure of reference memory. On the other hand, if the animal goes to a box that it has already emptied during the same test session, this indicates a failure of working memory. Various confounding factors, such as odor cues, are carefully controlled in such experiments.


title: Animal cognition

text: The water maze is used to test an animal's memory for spatial location and to discover how an animal is able to determine locations. Typically the maze is a circular tank filled with water that has been made milky so that it is opaque. Located somewhere in the maze is a small platform placed just below the surface of the water. When placed in the tank, the animal swims around until it finds and climbs up on the platform. With practice, the animal finds the platform more and more quickly. Reference memory is assessed by removing the platform and observing the relative amount of time the animal spends swimming in the area where the platform had been located. Visual and other cues in and around the tank may be varied to assess the animal's reliance on landmarks and the geometric relations among them.


title: Animal cognition

text: The novel object recognition (NOR) test is an animal behavior test that is primarily used to assess memory alterations in rodents. It is a simple behavioral test that is based on a rodents innate exploratory behavior. The test is divided into three phases: habituation, training/adaptation and test phase. During the habituation phase the animal is placed in an empty test arena. This is followed by the adaptation phase, where the animal is placed in the arena with two identical objects. In the third phase, the test phase, the animal is placed in the arena with one of the familiar objects from the previous phase and with one novel object. Based on the rodents innate curiosity, the animals that remember the familiar object will spend more time on investigating the novel object.


title: Animal cognition

text: Whether an animal ranges over a territory measured in square kilometers or square meters, its survival typically depends on its ability to do such things as find a food source and then return to its nest. Sometimes such a task can be performed rather simply, for example by following a chemical trail. Typically, however, the animal must somehow acquire and use information about locations, directions, and distances. The following paragraphs outline some of the ways that animals do this.


title: Animal cognition

text: Many animals travel hundreds or thousands of miles in seasonal migrations or returns to breeding grounds. They may be guided by the sun, the stars, the polarization of light, magnetic cues, olfactory cues, winds, or a combination of these. This extensive area of research is covered in the main article on Animal navigation.


title: Animal cognition

text: It has been hypothesized that animals such as apes and wolves are good at spatial cognition because this skill is necessary for survival. Some researchers argue that this ability may have diminished somewhat in dogs because humans have provided necessities such as food and shelter during some 15,000 years of domestication.


title: Animal cognition

text: The behavior of most animals is synchronized with the earth's daily light-dark cycle. Thus, many animals are active during the day, others are active at night, still others near dawn and dusk. Though one might think that these "circadian rhythms" are controlled simply by the presence or absence of light, nearly every animal that has been studied has been shown to have a "biological clock" that yields cycles of activity even when the animal is in constant illumination or darkness. Circadian rhythms are so automatic and fundamental to living things – they occur even in plants – that they are usually discussed separately from cognitive processes, and the reader is referred to the main article (Circadian rhythms) for further information.


title: Animal cognition

text: Survival often depends on an animal's ability to time intervals. For example, rufous hummingbirds feed on the nectar of flowers, and they often return to the same flower, but only after the flower has had enough time to replenish its supply of nectar. In one experiment hummingbirds fed on artificial flowers that quickly emptied of nectar but were refilled at some fixed time (e.g. twenty minutes) later. The birds learned to come back to the flowers at about the right time, learning the refill rates of up to eight separate flowers and remembering how long ago they had visited each one.


title: Animal cognition

text: The details of interval timing have been studied in a number of species. One of the most common methods is the "peak procedure". In a typical experiment, a rat in an operant chamber presses a lever for food. A light comes on, a lever-press brings a food pellet at a fixed later time, say 10 seconds, and then the light goes off. Timing is measured during occasional test trials on which no food is presented and the light stays on. On these test trials, the rat presses the lever more and more until about 10 sec and then, when no food comes, gradually stops pressing. The time at which the rat presses most on these test trials is taken to be its estimate of the payoff time.


title: Animal cognition

text: Experiments using the peak procedure and other methods have shown that animals can time short intervals quite exactly, can time more than one event at once, and can integrate time with spatial and other cues. Such tests have also been used for quantitative tests of theories of animal timing, such as Gibbon's Scalar Expectancy Theory ("SET"), Killeen's Behavioral Theory of Timing, and Machado's Learning to Time model. No one theory has yet gained unanimous agreement.


title: Animal cognition

text: Although tool use was long assumed to be a uniquely human trait, there is now much evidence that many animals use tools, including mammals, birds, fish, cephalopods and insects. Discussions of tool use often involve a debate about what constitutes a "tool", and they often consider the relation of tool use to the animal's intelligence and brain size.


title: Animal cognition

text: Tool use has been reported many times in both wild and captive primates, particularly the great apes. The use of tools by primates is varied and includes hunting (mammals, invertebrates, fish), collecting honey, processing food (nuts, fruits, vegetables and seeds), collecting water, weapons and shelter. Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans. Other mammals that spontaneously use tools in the wild or in captivity include elephants, bears, cetaceans, sea otters and mongooses.


title: Animal cognition

text: Several species of birds have been observed to use tools in the wild, including warblers, parrots, Egyptian vultures, brown-headed nuthatches, gulls and owls. Some species, such as the woodpecker finch of the Galapagos Islands, use particular tools as an essential part of their foraging behavior. However, these behaviors are often quite inflexible and cannot be applied effectively in new situations. A great many species of birds build nests with a wide range of complexities, but although nest-building behaviour fulfills the criteria of some definitions of "tool-use", this is not the case with other definitions.


title: Animal cognition

text: Several species of corvids have been trained to use tools in controlled experiments. One species examined extensively under laboratory conditions is the New Caledonian crow. One individual called “Betty” spontaneously made a wire tool to solve a novel problem. She was being tested to see whether she would select a wire hook rather than a straight wire to pull a little bucket of meat out of a well. Betty tried poking the straight wire at the meat. After a series of failures with this direct approach, she withdrew the wire and began directing it at the bottom of the well, which was secured to its base with duct tape. The wire soon became stuck, whereupon Betty pulled it sideways, bending it and unsticking it. She then inserted the hook into the well and extracted the meat. In all but one of 10 subsequent trials with only straight wire provided, she also made and used a hook in the same manner, but not before trying the straight wire first.


title: Animal cognition

text: Another bird that is highly studied for its intelligence is the African Gray Parrot. American animal behaviorist and psychologist Irene Pepperberg vindicated that African Grays possess cognitive abilities. Pepperberg used a bird named “Alex” in her trials and was able to prove that parrots could associate sound and meaning, demolishing long-held theories that birds were only capable of mimicking human voices. Studies by other researchers have determined that African Grays can use deductive reasoning to correctly choose between pairs of boxes containing food and boxes that are empty. Until Pepperberg began this research in the 1970s, few scientists had studied intelligence in parrots, and few do today. Most inquiries have instead focused on monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, and dolphins, all of which are much more difficult to raise, feed, and handle. By the late 1980s, Alex had learned the names of more than 50 different objects, five shapes, and seven colors. He'd also learned what "same" and "different" mean—a step so crucial in human intellectual development


title: Animal cognition

text: Several species of wrasses have been observed using rocks as anvils to crack bivalve (scallops, urchins and clams) shells. This behavior was first filmed in an orange-dotted tuskfish ("Choerodon anchorago") in 2009 by Giacomo Bernardi. The fish fans sand to unearth the bivalve, takes it into its mouth, swims several meters to a rock, which it then uses as an anvil by smashing the mollusc apart with sideward thrashes of the head. This behaviour has also been recorded in a blackspot tuskfish ("Choerodon schoenleinii") on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, yellowhead wrasse ("Halichoeres garnoti") in Florida and a six-bar wrasse ("Thalassoma hardwicke") in an aquarium setting. These species are at opposite ends of the phylogenetic tree in this family, so this behaviour may be a deep-seated trait in all wrasses.


title: Animal cognition

text: The world's smartest invertebrate is by far the octopus. Octopuses can carry out complex tasks such as opening jars to get the contents inside and have remarkable ability to learn new skills from the moment they are born. Some cephalopods are known to use coconut shells for protection or camouflage. Cephalopod cognitive evolution is hypothesized to have been shaped primarily by predatory and foraging pressures, but a challenging mating context may also have played a role.


title: Animal cognition

text: Ants of the species "Conomyrma bicolor" pick up stones and other small objects with their mandibles and drop them down the vertical entrances of rival colonies, allowing workers to forage for food without competition.


title: Animal cognition

text: It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving problems that appear to require abstract reasoning; Wolfgang Köhler's (1917) work with chimpanzees is a famous early example. He observed that chimpanzees did not use trial and error to solve problems such as retrieving bananas hung out of reach. Instead, they behaved in a manner that was "unwaveringly purposeful," spontaneously placing boxes so that they could climb to reach the fruit. Modern research has identified similar behavior in animals usually thought of as much less intelligent, if appropriate pre-training is given. Causal reasoning has also been observed in rooks and New Caledonian crows.


title: Animal cognition

text: It has been shown that Barbados bullfinches ("Loxigilla barbadensis") from urbanized areas are better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that they did not differ in colour discrimination learning.


title: Animal cognition

text: A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other individuals or situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.


title: Animal cognition

text: Cognitive bias is sometimes illustrated by using answers to the question "Is the glass half empty or half full?". Choosing "half empty" is supposed to indicate pessimism whereas choosing "half full" indicates optimism. To test this in animals, an individual is trained to anticipate that stimulus A, e.g. a 100 Hz tone, precedes a positive event, e.g. highly desired food is delivered when a lever is pressed by the animal. The same individual is trained to anticipate that stimulus B, e.g. a 900 Hz tone, precedes a negative event, e.g. bland food is delivered when the animal presses a lever. The animal is then tested by being given an intermediate stimulus C, e.g. a 500 Hz tone, and observing whether the animal presses the lever associated with the positive or negative reward. This has been suggested to indicate whether the animal is in a positive or negative mood.


title: Animal cognition

text: In a study that used this approach, rats that were playfully tickled responded differently than rats that were simply handled. The rats that had been tickled were more optimistic than the handled rats. The authors suggested that they had demonstrated "...for the first time a link between the directly measured positive affective state and decision making under uncertainty in an animal model".


title: Animal cognition

text: There is some evidence for cognitive bias in a number of species, including rats, dogs, rhesus macaques, sheep, chicks, starlings and honeybees.


title: Animal cognition

text: The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research. In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behavior to some non-primate species, including parrots and great spotted woodpeckers. Arguing from his own results with the animal Nim Chimpsky and his analysis of others results, Herbert Terrace criticized the idea that chimps can produce new sentences. Shortly thereafter Louis Herman published research on artificial language comprehension in the bottlenosed dolphin (Herman, Richards, & Wolz, 1984). Though this sort of research has been controversial, especially among cognitive linguists, many researchers agree that many animals can understand the meaning of individual words, and that some may understand simple sentences and syntactic variations, but there is little evidence that any animal can produce new strings of symbols that correspond to new sentences.


title: Animal cognition

text: Wolfgang Köhler is usually credited with introducing the concept of insight into experimental psychology. Working with chimpanzees, Köhler came to dispute Edward Thorndike's theory that animals must solve problems gradually, by trial and error. He said that Thorndike's animals could only use trial and error because the situation precluded other forms of problem solving. He provided chimps with a relatively unstructured situation, and he observed sudden "ah-ha!" insightful changes of behavior, as, for example, when a chimp suddenly moved a box into position so that it could retrieve a banana. More recently, Asian elephants ("Elephas maximus") were shown to exhibit similar insightful problem solving. A male was observed moving a box to a position where it could be stood upon to reach food that had been deliberately hung out of reach.


title: Animal cognition

text: A variety of studies indicates that animals are able to use and communicate quantitative information, and that some can count in a rudimentary way. Some examples of this research follow.


title: Animal cognition

text: In one study, rhesus monkeys viewed visual displays containing, for example, 1, 2, 3, or 4 items of different sorts. They were trained to respond to them in several ways involving numerical ordering, for example touching "1" first, "2" second and so on. When tested with displays containing items they had never seen before, they continued to respond to them in order. The authors conclude that monkeys can represent the numerosities 1 to 9 at least on an ordinal scale.


title: Animal cognition

text: Ants are able to use quantitative values and transmit this information. For instance, ants of several species are able to estimate quite precisely numbers of encounters with members of other colonies on their feeding territories. Numeracy has been described in the yellow mealworm beetle ("Tenebrio molitor") and the honeybee.


title: Animal cognition

text: Western lowland gorillas given the choice between two food trays demonstrated the ability to choose the tray with more food items at a rate higher than chance after training. In a similar task, chimpanzees chose the option with the larger amount of food. Salamanders given a choice between two displays with differing amounts of fruit flies, used as a food reward, reliably choose the display with more flies, as shown in a particular experiment.


title: Animal cognition

text: Other experiments have been conducted that show animals' abilities to differentiate between non-food quantities. American black bears demonstrated quantity differentiation abilities in a task with a computer screen. The bears were trained to touch a computer monitor with a paw or nose to choose a quantity of dots in one of two boxes on the screen. Each bear was trained with reinforcement to pick a larger or smaller amount. During training, the bears were rewarded with food for a correct response. All bears performed better than what random error predicted on the trials with static, non-moving dots, indicating that they could differentiate between the two quantities. The bears choosing correctly in congruent (number of dots coincided with area of the dots) and incongruent (number of dots did not coincide with area of the dots) trials suggests that they were indeed choosing between quantities that appeared on the screen, not just a larger or smaller retinal image, which would indicate they are only judging size.


title: Animal cognition

text: Bottlenose dolphins have shown the ability to choose an array with fewer dots compared to one with more dots. Experimenters set up two boards showing various numbers of dots in a poolside setup. The dolphins were initially trained to choose the board with the fewer number of dots. This was done by rewarding the dolphin when it chose the board with the fewer number of dots. In the experimental trials, two boards were set up, and the dolphin would emerge from the water and point to one board. The dolphins chose the arrays with fewer dots at a rate much larger than chance, indicating they can differentiate between quantities.


title: Animal cognition

text: A particular grey parrot, after training, has shown the ability to differentiate between the numbers zero through six using vocalizations. After number and vocalization training, this was done by asking the parrot how many objects there were in a display. The parrot was able to identify the correct amount at a rate higher than chance.


title: Animal cognition

text: Angelfish, when put in an unfamiliar environment will group together with conspecifics, an action named shoaling. Given the choice between two groups of differing size, the angelfish will choose the larger of the two groups. This can be seen with a discrimination ratio of 2:1 or greater, such that, as long as one group has at least twice the fish as another group, it will join the larger one.


title: Animal cognition

text: Monitor lizards have been shown to be capable of numeracy, and some species can distinguish among numbers up to six.


title: Animal cognition

text: As the cognitive ability and intelligence in non-human animals cannot be measured with verbal scales, it has been measured using a variety of methods that involve such things as habit reversal, social learning, and responses to novelty. Principal component analysis and factor analytic studies have shown that a single factor of intelligence is responsible for 47% of the individual variance in cognitive ability measures in primates and between 55% and 60% of the variance in mice. These values are similar to the accepted variance in IQ explained by a similar single factor known as the general factor of intelligence in humans (40-50%). However, results from a recent meta-analysis suggest that the average correlation between performance scores on various cognitive tasks is only 0.18. Results from this study suggest that current evidence for general intelligence is weak in non-human animals.


title: Animal cognition

text: The general factor of intelligence, or "g" factor, is a psychometric construct that summarizes the correlations observed between an individual's scores on various measures of cognitive abilities. It has been suggested that "g" is related to evolutionary life histories and the evolution of intelligence as well as to social learning and cultural intelligence. Non-human models of "g" have been used in genetic and neurological research on intelligence to help understand the mechanisms behind variation in "g".


title: Animal cognition

text: Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states, e.g. intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, to oneself and others and to understand that others have desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.


title: Animal cognition

text: Some research with ravens provides an example of evidence for theory of mind in a non-human species. Ravens are members of the family Corvidae, which is widely regarded as having high cognitive abilities. These birds have been observed to hide their food when dominant ravens are visible and audible at the same time. Based on this observation, ravens were tested for their understanding of "seeing" as a mental state. In a first step, the birds protected their cache when dominants were visible but not when they could only be heard from an adjacent room. In the next step, they had access to a small peephole which allowed them to see into the adjacent room. With the peephole open, the ravens guarded their caches against discovery when they could hear dominants in the adjacent room, even when the dominant's sounds were playbacks of recordings.


title: Animal cognition

text: The sense in which animals can be said to have self-consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated. The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Gordon G. Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behavior towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for other great apes, the European magpie, some cetaceans and an Asian elephant, but not for monkeys. The mirror test has been criticized by researchers because it is entirely focused on vision, the primary sense in humans, while other species rely more heavily on other senses such as the sense of smell in dogs. Though generally dismissed in the paleontology community, Mark McMenamin published in the 21st Century Science & Technology that fossils from several dead Ichthyosaurs is evidence of an intelligent Triassic cephalopod creating a primitive self-portrait.


title: Animal cognition

text: It has been suggested that metacognition in some animals provides some evidence for cognitive self-awareness. The great apes, dolphins, and rhesus monkeys have demonstrated the ability to monitor their own mental states and use an "I don't know" response to avoid answering difficult questions. Unlike the mirror test, which reveals awareness of the condition of one's own body, this uncertainty monitoring is thought to reveal awareness of one's internal mental state. A 2007 study has provided some evidence for metacognition in rats, although this interpretation has been questioned. These species might also be aware of the strength of their memories.


title: Animal cognition

text: Some researchers propose that animal calls and other vocal behaviors provide evidence of consciousness. This idea arose from research on children's crib talk by Weir (1962) and in investigations of early speech in children by Greenfield and others (1976). Some such research has been done with a macaw (see Arielle).


title: Animal cognition

text: In July, 2012 during the "Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals" conference in Cambridge a group of scientists announced and signed a declaration with the following conclusions:


title: Animal cognition

text: Instinctive drift can influence the interpretation of cognitive research. Instinctive drift is the tendency of an animal to revert to instinctive behaviors that can interfere with learned responses. The concept originated with Keller and Marian Breland when they taught a raccoon to put coins into a box. The raccoon drifted to its instinctive behavior of rubbing the coins with its paws, as it would do when foraging for food.


title: Animal cognition

text: Animal ability to process and respond to stimuli is correlated with brain size. Small-brain animals tend to show simple behaviors that are less dependent on learning than those of large-brained animals. Vertebrates, particularly mammals, have large brains and complex behavior that changes with experience. A formula called the encephalization quotient (EC) expresses a relationship between brain and body size; it was developed by H.J. Jerison in the late 1960s. When the encephalization quotient is plotted as a curve, an animal with an EC above the curve is expected to show more cognitive ability than the average animal of its size, whereas an animal with an EC below the curve is expected to have less. Various formulas been suggested, but the equation Ew(brain) = 0.12w(body) has been found to fit data from a sample of mammals. The formula is suggestive at best, and should only be applied to non-mammals with extreme caution. For some of the other vertebrate classes, the power of 3/4 rather than 2/3 is sometimes used, and for many groups of invertebrates, the formula may not give meaningful results.


title: Animal cognition

text: Several experiments cannot be readily reconciled with the belief that some animal species are intelligent, insightful, or possess a theory of mind.


title: Animal cognition

text: Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915), setting the stage for all subsequent experiments of this kind, argued that insects "obey their compelling instinct, without realizing what they do". For instance, to understand that she can grab her paralyzed prey by a leg instead of an antenna is utterly beyond the powers of a sand wasp. "Her actions are like a series of echoes each awakening the next in a settled order, which allows none to sound until the previous one has sounded." Fabre's numerous experiments led him, in turn, to the view that scientists often try to "exalt animals" instead of objectively studying them.


title: Animal cognition

text: C. Lloyd Morgan's (1852–1936) observations suggested to him that prima facie intelligent behavior in animals is often the result of either instincts or trial and error. For instance, most visitors watching Morgan's dog smoothly lifting a latch with the back of its head (and thereby opening a garden gate and escaping) were convinced that the dog's actions involved thinking. Morgan, however, carefully observed the dog's prior, random, purposeless actions and argued that they involved "continued trial and failure, until a happy effect is reached", rather than "methodical planning".


title: Animal cognition

text: E. L. Thorndike (1874–1949) placed hungry cats and dogs in enclosures "from which they could escape by some simple act, such as pulling at a loop of cord". Their behavior suggested to him that they did not "possess the power of rationality". Most books about animal behavior, Thorndike wrote, "do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy of animals".


title: Animal cognition

text: Although Wolfgang Köhler's experiments are often cited as providing support for the animal cognition hypothesis, his book is replete with counterexamples. For instance, he placed chimpanzees in a situation where they could only get bananas by removing a box.  The chimpanzee, Köhler observed, "has special difficulty in solving such problems; he often draws into a situation the strangest and most distant tools, and adopts the most peculiar methods, rather than remove a simple obstacle which could be displaced with perfect ease".


title: Animal cognition

text: Daniel J. Povinelli and Timothy Eddy of the University of Louisiana showed that chimpanzees, when given a choice between two food providers, were just as likely to beg food from a person who could see the begging gesture as from a person who could not, thereby raising the possibility that chimpanzees do not understand that people see.


title: Animal cognition

text: Moty Nissani of Wayne State University trained Burmese logging elephants to lift a lid in order to retrieve food from a bucket. The lid was then placed on the ground alongside the bucket (where it no longer obstructed access to the food) while the treat was simultaneously placed inside the bucket. All elephants continued to toss the lid before retrieving the reward, thus suggesting that elephants do not grasp simple causal relationships.


title: Animal cognition

text: A traditionally common image is the "scala naturae", the ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top. However, there is some disagreement with the use of such a hierarchy, with some critics saying it may be necessary to understand specific cognitive capacities as adaptations to differing ecological niches. Some biologists argue that humans are not, in fact, the smartest animal, and that no animal can be characterized as the smartest, given that some animals have superior cognitive skills in certain areas. This contrasts with evolutionary psychologists such as John Tooby, who assess, based on the large list of related unique characteristics that humans do possess, that humans evolved to fill a unique "cognitive niche" and can fairly be characterized as the smartest animal.


title: Animal cognition

text: Whether fairly or not, the performance of animals is often compared to that of humans on cognitive tasks. Not surprisingly, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to perform most like humans. Among the birds, corvids and parrots have typically been found to perform well on human-like tasks. Some octopodes have also been shown to exhibit a number of higher-level skills such as tool use, but the amount of research on cephalopod intelligence is still limited.


title: Karlie Redd

text: Karlie Redd ("née" Lewis; born April 15) born Keisha Lewis, is an American television personality, rapper, model and actress. She rose to prominence for appearing as a main cast member of VH1's reality show "" since its premiere in June 2012.


title: Karlie Redd

text: Karlie (sometimes reported as "Keisha") Lewis was born in New York City to a Trinidadian mother and African-American father. Redd's birthday is April 15, but her year of birth is disputed. Redd spent her childhood between Trinidad and New York until returning to New York permanently at age 12. For education, Redd attended The Harlem School of the Arts and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Redd is a college graduate.


title: Karlie Redd

text: In 2001, Redd was cast in the movie "Black Spring Break 2" where she was credited as Keisha "Karlie" Lewis. In 2010, Redd was in the VH1 reality show "Scream Queens". In 2012 she was cast in the spin-off VH1 reality show, "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta". Redd has dated hip hop artists Benzino and Yung Joc on the show. According to an analysis done by a language analytics company, Redd's appearances on the fifth season of the show garnered 16% of all emotional reactions about the show collected from social media data, with the largest share of them being negative.


title: Karlie Redd

text: Redd's first role in a box office film was in the Chris Rock movie "Top Five" in 2014. She currently plays a recurring role on the soap opera "Saints and Sinners", which appears on Bounce TV.


title: Karlie Redd

text: In July 2012, Redd released her debut single, "A Girl Has Needs", on iTunes. In October 2018, she announced an upcoming musical project called "Karlie Ferrari" which may be released as an EP.


title: Karlie Redd

text: In the summer of 2012, Redd launched the Redd Remy Hairline. She opened a women's clothing store called Merci Boutique in 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.


title: Karlie Redd

text: Redd's birthday is April 15, and her birth year is estimated to be between 1969 and 1978. In 2012, Redd stated that she was "in her twenties" but would not reveal her birth year. Her age has been disputed by "" co-star K. Michelle and Redd's ex-boyfriend and fellow co-star Benzino, Yung Joc, Scrapp DeLeon, Lyfe Jennings and Ceaser from Black Ink Crew, who have said she is older than she claims. Redd has an adult daughter, Jasmine, who was in college in 2015 and has appeared on "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta". In a 2015 Playboy Plus spread, Redd listed her age as 37, putting her birth year at 1978. On May 20, 2019, in an interview with "The Real", Redd stated her age to be 45.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The Joint Venture Protective Carbine (JVPC), also known as Modern Sub Machine Carbine (MSMC) until 2014, is a gas-operated, magazine-fed, select fire submachine gun designed to chamber the 5.56×30mm MINSAS cartridge. It was designed by the Armament Research and Development Establishment of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and manufactured by the Advanced Weapons and Equipment India Limited. It was intended as a replacement for the 9mm Sterling submachine gun in service with the Indian Armed Forces.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The development of the JVPC began in 2010, being an offshoot of the INSAS small arms program. Its trials were commenced in 2016 and completed in 2021. The JVPC cleared the final phase of user trials by the Indian Army. The weapon's accuracy and reliability were tested in extreme hot weather and high-altitude winter conditions, by the Army's user trials.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The JVPC already cleared user trials conducted by Ministry of Home Affairs and is currently being procured for the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) and other state police forces in the country.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The development of a carbine was one of the objectives of the late 1980's "Indian Small Arms System (INSAS) programme," which developed the INSAS assault rifle. An INSAS based carbine said to have been developed in early 2000s, but was rejected. The INSAS based carbine was designed to chamber the same 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge used in the INSAS assault rifle and the LMG, hence it had a higher recoil than a carbine of its size should normally have. In 2002, the Army has issued a General Staff Qualitative Requirement (GSQR) for a new submachine carbine with revised specification. In response to the new GSQR, both OFB and ARDE independently developed two carbines – Amogh carbine and MSMC respectively. Both of these carbines were designed to chamber much lighter 5.56×30mm MINSAS cartridge. The prototypes underwent a series of trials – first in 2006, then in late 2007 and finally in early 2009. Both of the carbines failed to meet the requirement set by the Army. In 2010, DRDO's ARDE lab and OFB collaborated to iron out the problems with the MSMC design. The redesigned MSMC was now redesignated as "Joint Venture Protective Carbine" or "JVPC." The prototypes of JVPC was offered to the Army for user trials in 2013. Also in this time period an exigency for a carbine has arisen.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The user trials by Indian Army commenced in 2016 and completed by 2021. The JVPC was subjected to accuracy and reliability test at extreme temperature conditions of India. The final user trials were conducted at the sub-zero cold desert of Ladakh.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The JVPC was earlier cleared user trials by CAPF. In 2017, the then Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh ceremonially accepted a JVPC from the then Minister of Defence Nirmala Sitharaman, marking its service induction into the CAPF, Paramilitary forces and Police forces under the Ministry of Home affairs. The JVPC is currently being procured for the CAPF.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The MSMC or JVPC is a highly compact weapon that is less than 22 inches long with the stock collapsed, making it ideal for personal defence, close quarter battle and counter insurgency/counter terrorism operations. Like machine pistols such as the Uzi, the JVPC has a pistol grip with a magazine well. A 30-round MSMC magazine is inserted through this pistol grip. The JVPC's ergonomic pistol grip design, low recoil and compact size allows the user to fire it like a pistol. It has a retractable stock and ambidextrous fire selector located above the trigger. The upper receiver of the prototypes were made of stamped metal sheet, while production models are manufactured using metal injection molding technique. It has multiple MIL-STD-1913 picatinny rail system – one on the upper receiver for mounting modern optics and sights and one on the lower for mounting forward hand grip. The lower receiver is mostly made of polymer.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The JVPC has an overall length of 745 mm when stock is extended and 552 mm when stock is collapsed, making it a highly compact weapon. It has a barrel length of 300 mm and an effective range of 200 to 300 metre. JVPC has provision to equip barrel attachments such as suppressor and bayonet. The JVPC is designed to fire 5.56×30mm MINSAS round and have a muzzle velocity of 650 meters per second. The 5.56×30mm ammunition used in JVPC is said to be superior to both FN 5.7×28mm and HK 4.6×30mm cartridges.


title: Modern Sub Machine Carbine

text: The JVPC has gas operated rotating bolt mechanism and features two modes of fire – single and full auto, which fires at a rate of 800–900 round/min.


title: India at the 2022 Winter Olympics

text: India's team consisted of one male alpine skier. Arif Khan was the country's flagbearer during the opening ceremony. Meanwhile a volunteer was the flagbearer during the closing ceremony.


title: India at the 2022 Winter Olympics

text: The Ministry of External Affairs decided that Indian envoy will not attend the opening or closing ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics because of China making a Galwan soldier a torchbearer.


title: India at the 2022 Winter Olympics

text: By meeting the basic qualification standards, India qualified one male alpine skier Arif Khan. He competed in Slalom and Giant Slalom events.


title: 9th Wonder

text: Patrick Denard Douthit (born January 15, 1975), better known as 9th Wonder, is a hip hop record producer, record executive, DJ, and rapper from North Carolina. He began his career as the main producer for the group Little Brother in Durham, North Carolina, and has also worked with Jean Grae, Wale, Murs, Buckshot, Erykah Badu, David Banner, Rapsody, and Talib Kweli. As of 2010, 9th Wonder raps under the name of 9thmatic. 9th Wonder's production often builds on samples from artists such as Al Green and Curtis Mayfield.


title: 9th Wonder

text: 9th Wonder's first significant career breakthrough came in 2003 when, as an up-and-coming producer, he released an unofficial remix album of Nas' 2002 album "God's Son" entitled "God's Stepson". Released through internet outlets, the album garnered significant attention and acclaim. The producer has said that he was not thinking in terms of using it to generate a buzz or promote his skills at that point: "I never thought any of this of me as a producer was going to happen." The album has since been credited as starting the now regular trend for unofficial 'home-made' remixes of whole albums.


title: 9th Wonder

text: 9th Wonder began his career as the main producer for the group Little Brother. As part of Little Brother he gained recognition and critical acclaim for his production on their debut 2003 release, "The Listening". Jay-Z's studio engineer Young Guru was impressed with his work, and contacted 9th Wonder, which led to 9th Wonder producing "Threat" for Jay-Z's 2003 "The Black Album". The cut proved to be a mainstream breakthrough for 9th Wonder, most immediately in the major production role he secured on Destiny's Child's 2004 "Destiny Fulfilled" album that Jay-Z was instrumental in helping bring about. On the album, 9th Wonder produced the tracks "Girl" and "Is She the Reason", plus the bonus track "Game Over".


title: 9th Wonder

text: In August 2010, Drake exchanged tweets with 9th Wonder on Twitter, expressing his desire to work with him again (the first time being the production of "Think Good Thoughts" featuring Phonte and Elzhi for his 2007 mixtape "Comeback Season"). It was revealed in October 2010 that 9th Wonder would be producing for Drake on his second album, "Take Care", which was released on November 15, 2011. However, a month prior to the release, 9th Wonder said in an interview that he would not appear on "Take Care" due to A&R issues.


title: 9th Wonder

text: Singer Chris Brown recorded a series of rap freestyles over 9th Wonder beats. The first was released on July 18, 2011, on YouTube under the title "Real Hip Hop #3". This was followed a day later by "Real Hip Hop #4" featuring Kevin McCall. These tracks were included in Brown's rap mixtape "Boy in Detention", released on August 5, 2011.


title: 9th Wonder

text: On June 25, 2020, 9th Wonder, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, and Robert Glasper announced the formation of a supergroup, Dinner Party. They released a single, "Freeze Tag". Their debut album was released on July 10, 2020.


title: 9th Wonder

text: 2007 saw a sideline move into music academia for 9th Wonder when he, along with Christopher "Play" Martin from hip hop group Kid-n-Play, was appointed Artist-In-Residence by the Chancellor of North Carolina Central University, and began instructing a hip hop history class in NCCU's Music Dept.


title: 9th Wonder

text: His role as a music professor has proven an ongoing one as in January 2010 it was announced that 9th Wonder would co-teach a class titled "Sampling Soul" with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal at Duke University. In an interview with HitQuarters, he explained the reason for the move into academia: "Educating the youth on where hip-hop comes from and the history of it, using the records we use, gives hip-hop a longer life. I decided to become an advocate of that." 9th Wonder also recently took on a course titled "Intro to Hip Hop Production".


title: 9th Wonder

text: In May 2021, Douthit joined the Faculty at Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at Long Island University as a visiting professor. His courses include the history of hip hop and The Making of an Album.


title: Hello Games

text: Hello Games Ltd is a British video game company based in Guildford, Surrey. The company was founded by Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Ream in February 2008 and has developed the "Joe Danger" series, "No Man's Sky", and "The Last Campfire".


title: Hello Games

text: Hello Games was founded in February 2008 by Sean Murray and Grant Duncan, together with friends Ryan Doyle and David Ream. Murray had been a developer at Electronic Arts prior and had grown tired of developing repeated sequels, and decided to leave to form his own studio to make a game he always wanted to make, "Joe Danger", which was the studio's first release in 2010. At the 2010 "Develop" Awards, they won two awards: Best New Studio and Best Micro Studio. In September 2010, they were listed by "The Guardian" as one of the 100 most innovative and creative British companies of the previous 12 months. The popularity and success of "Joe Danger" led them to develop a sequel, "".


title: Hello Games

text: Murray said that coming back to do a sequel after having left Electronic Arts from doing sequels led to a mid-life crisis for himself, and gave rise for the idea of "No Man's Sky", inspired by science fiction of the 1980s, with an entire universe of over 18 quintillion planets created through procedural generation. Developed by only a small four-person team led by Murray, "No Man's Sky", was revealed at the VGX 2013 award show and generated a large amount of hype for the game. On 24 December 2013, the studio's offices were flooded after a nearby river broke its bank, with much of the hardware used in the development of the game being destroyed, but they were able to recover most of their projects' code and were able to relocate.


title: Hello Games

text: The media continued to build excitement for "No Man's Sky", furthered by Sony Interactive Entertainment obtaining publishing rights for it on the PlayStation 4. However, the game was launched a few months late, and players found soon after launch many of the features in the game that had been seemingly promised in early media were absent such as multiplayer functions. Hello Games had also gone silent save for technical support. Hello Games was accused of dishonesty surrounding their promotion of the game, and the subsequent lack of promised features, but which Murray explained in later interviews that they failed to control the hype being generated by the media nor setting expectations for players of what the game would be like at launch and how they would develop it over time. Since launch, many of these missing features were added via numerous free post-release updates as well as new features including support for virtual reality and cross-platform play across multiple consoles, leading to the studio being praised for staying true to their vision of the game.


title: Hello Games

text: In 2017, the studio announced an initiative to fund multiple experimental and procedural generation projects based on their work in "No Man's Sky" called Hello Labs. At The Game Awards 2018, Hello Games announced "The Last Campfire", a game developed by three employees, that was released in August 2020.


title: Hello Games

text: In September 2020, Murray said that while some of the staff were still working on continued updates for "No Man's Sky", the remaining staff were working on a new game, but to avoid the issues around "No Man's Sky"s launch hype, he planned to keep specifics of the game quiet until they are nearly ready to present it to the world. Murray said in April 2022 of the game, still in its early stages, "it's the kind of project that even if we had a thousand people working on it, it'd still seem impossible".


title: Filigree

text: Filigree (also less commonly spelled "filagree", and formerly written "filigrann" or "filigrene") is a form of intricate metalwork used in jewellery and other small forms of metalwork.


title: Filigree

text: In jewellery, it is usually of gold and silver, made with tiny beads or twisted threads, or both in combination, soldered together or to the surface of an object of the same metal and arranged in artistic motifs. It often suggests lace and remains popular in Indian and other Asian metalwork. It was popular as well in Italian, French and Portuguese metalwork from 1660 to the late 19th century. It should not be confused with ajoure jewellery work, the ajoure technique consisting of drilling holes in objects made of sheet metal.


title: Filigree

text: The English word filigree is shortened from the earlier use of "filigreen" which derives from Latin "filum" meaning thread and "granum" grain, in the sense of small bead. The Latin words gave "filigrana" in Italian which itself became "filigrane" in 17th-century French.


title: Filigree

text: Though filigree has become a special branch of jewellery in modern times, it was historically part of the ordinary work of the jeweller. Indeed, all the jewellery of the Etruscans and Greeks (other than that intended for the grave, and therefore of an unsubstantial character) was made by soldering together and so building up the gold rather than by chiselling or engraving the material.


title: Filigree

text: Archaeological finds in ancient Mesopotamia indicate that filigree was incorporated into jewellery since 3,000 BC. Specific to the city of Midyat in Mardin Province in upper Mesopotamia, a form of filigree using silver and gold wires, known as "telkari", was developed in the 15th Century. To this day, expert craftsmen in this region continue to produce fine pieces of telkari.


title: Filigree

text: Egyptian jewellers employed wire, both to lay down on a background and to plait or otherwise arranged jour. But, with the exception of chains, it cannot be said that filigree work was much practiced by them. Their strength lay rather in their cloisonné work and their molded ornaments. Many examples, however, remain of round plaited gold chains of fine wire, such as those that are still made by the filigree workers of India, and known as trichinopoly chains. From some of these are hung smaller chains of finer wire with minute fishes and other pendants fastened to them.


title: Filigree

text: In ornaments derived from Phoenician sites, such as Cyprus and Sardinia, patterns of gold wire are laid down with great delicacy on a gold ground, but the art was advanced to its highest perfection in the Greek and Etruscan filigree of the 6th to the 3rd centuries BC. A number of earrings and other personal ornaments found in central Italy are preserved in the Louvre and in the British Museum. Almost all of them are made of filigree work. Some earrings are in the form of flowers of geometric design, bordered by one or more rims each made up of minute volutes of gold wire, and this kind of ornament is varied by slight differences in the way of disposing the number or arrangement of the volutes. But the feathers and petals of modern Italian filigree are not seen in these ancient designs. Instances occur, but only rarely, in which filigree devices in wire are self-supporting and not applied to metal plates.


title: Filigree

text: The museum of the Hermitage at Saint Petersburg contains a large collection of Scythian jewellery from the tombs of the Crimea. Many bracelets and necklaces in that collection are made of twisted wire, some in as many as seven rows of plaiting, with clasps in the shape of heads of animals of beaten work. Others are strings of large beads of gold, decorated with volutes, knots and other patterns of wire soldered over the surfaces. In the British Museum a sceptre, probably that of a Greek priestess, is covered with plaited and netted gold wipe, finished with a sort of Corinthian capital and a boss of green glass.


title: Filigree

text: It is probable that in India, Iran (in Zanjan, this handicraft is called ) and various parts of central Asia filigree has been worked from the most remote period without any change in the designs. Whether the Asiatic jewellers were influenced by the Greeks who settled on that continent, or merely trained under traditions held in common with them, it is certain that the Indian filigree workers retain the same patterns as those of the ancient Greeks and work them in the same way, down to the present day. Wandering workmen are given so much gold, coined or rough, which is weighed, heated in a pan of charcoal, beaten into wire, and then worked in the courtyard or verandah of the employer's house according to the designs of the artist, who weighs the complete work on restoring it and is paid at a specified rate for his labour. Very fine grains or beads and spines of gold, scarcely thicker than coarse hair, projecting from plates of gold are methods of ornamentation still used.


title: Filigree

text: Cuttack, of the eastern Indian state Odisha, features traditional filigree work Known as "tarakasi" in the Odia language, most filigree work revolves around images of deities, though due to lack of patronage and modern design ideas, it is a dying art. Also noted is silver filigree of Karimnagar in Telangana state.


title: Filigree

text: Passing to later times, there are in many collections of medieval jewel work reliquaries, covers for Gospel books, etc., made either in Constantinople from the 6th to the 12th centuries, or in monasteries in Europe, in which studied and imitated Byzantine goldsmiths' work. These objects, besides being enriched with precious stones, polished, but not cut into facets, and with enamels, are often decorated with filigree. Large surfaces of gold are sometimes covered with scrolls of filigree soldered on, and corner pieces of the borders of book covers, or the panels of reliquaries, are frequently made up of complicated pieces of plaited work alternating with spaces encrusted with enamel. Byzantine filigree work occasionally has small stones set amongst the curves or knots. Examples of such decoration can be seen in the Victoria and Albert, and British Museums. Examples include the Cross of Lothair in Aachen.


title: Filigree

text: In the north of Europe, the Saxons, Britons and Celts were from an early period skillful in several kinds of goldsmiths' work. Admirable examples of filigree patterns laid down in wire on gold, from Anglo-Saxon tombs, may be seen in the British Museum, notably a brooch from Dover, and a sword-hilt from Cumberland. The Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver (estimated 700 CE) discovered in a field in Staffordshire, England, on 5 July 2009 contains numerous examples of very fine filigree described by archaeologist Kevin Leahy as "incredible".


title: Filigree

text: Irish filigree work of the Insular period is more thoughtful in design and more extremely varied in pattern. The Royal Irish Academy in Dublin contains a number of reliquaries and personal jewels, of which filigree is the general and most remarkable ornament. The Tara Brooch, in the National Museum of Ireland, has been copied and imitated numerous since the mid 19th century; Queen Victoria had a copy made in the late 1840s. Instead of fine curls or volutes of gold thread, Irish filigree is varied by numerous designs by which one thread can be traced through curious knots and complications, which, disposed over large surfaces, balance one another, but always with special varieties and arrangements difficult to trace with the eye. The long thread appears and disappears without breach of continuity, the two ends generally worked into the head and the tail of a serpent or a monster.


title: Filigree

text: The reliquary containing the "Bell of Saint Patrick" is covered with knotted work in many varieties. A two-handled chalice, called the "Ardagh Chalice" found near Limerick in 1868, is ornamented with work of this kind of extraordinary fineness. Twelve plaques on a band round the body of the vase, plaques on each handle and round the foot of the vase have a series of different designs of characteristic patterns, in fine filigree wire work wrought on the front of the repoussé ground.


title: Filigree

text: Much of the medieval jewel work all over Europe down to the 15th century, on reliquaries, crosses, croziers, and other ecclesiastical goldsmiths' work, is set off with bosses and borders of filigree. Filigree work in silver was practised by the Moors of Spain during the Middle Ages with great skill, and was introduced by them and established all over the Iberian Peninsula, hence it was carried to the Spanish colonies in America.


title: Filigree

text: The manufacture spread over the Balearic Islands, and among the populations that border the Mediterranean. It is still made all over Italy, and in Portugal, Malta, North Macedonia, Albania, the Ionian Islands and many other parts of Greece. That of the Greeks is sometimes on a large scale, with several thicknesses of wires alternating with larger and smaller bosses and beads, sometimes set with turquoises, and mounted on convex plates, making rich ornamental headpieces, belts, and breast ornaments. Filigree silver buttons of wire-work and small bosses are worn by the peasants in most of the countries that produce this kind of jewellery.


title: Filigree

text: Silver filigree brooches and buttons are also made in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Little chains and pendants are added to much of this northern work.


title: Filigree

text: The oldest filigree pieces discovered in the Iberian Peninsula date back to 2000–2500 BC, but its origin is not clear. These pieces possibly belonged to merchants and navigators originally from the Middle East and are not thought to have been produced in the region at that time. Filigree began to be produced in Portugal in the 8th century with the arrival of Arab migrants, who brought new patterns with them. With time, the peninsula began to produce different filigree patterns, but while in Spain the filigree jewellery-making tradition became less relevant, in Portugal it was perfected. After the 18th century, Portuguese Filigree already had its own distinctive imagery, motifs and shapes. Filigree from the 17th and 18th centuries became famous for their extraordinary complexity. Gold and silver filigree jewellery of delicate and artistic design is still made in considerable quantities throughout the country, particularly filigree hearts, which are iconic symbols of Portuguese jewellery-making.


title: Filigree

text: Filigree work was brought to Great Britain from Abyssinia after the Battle of Magdala: armguards, slippers, and cups, some of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are made of thin plates of silver, over which the wirework is soldered. The filigree is subdivided by narrow borders of simple pattern, and the intervening spaces are made up of many patterns, some with grains set at intervals.


title: Filigree

text: The art may be said to consist in curling, twisting and plaiting fine pliable threads of metal, and uniting them at their points of contact with each other, and with the ground, by means of flux such as borax, by the help of the blowpipe. When granulated motifs are desired, small beads are made traditionally by using precious metal wire or fine sheet to start with, which is cut up in small pieces mixed with flux and placed in the small holes of a pitted block of charcoal (or any other suitable refractory material) and are then melted with a blowpipe (or today with a blowtorch), after which the bits of wire curl up and take a natural spherical like shape to end up in minuscule grains which slightly differ one from the other. Small grains or beads of the same metals are often set in the eyes of volutes, on the junctions, or at intervals at which they will set off the wirework effectively. The more delicate work is generally protected by framework of stouter wire.


title: Filigree

text: Brooches, crosses, earrings, buttons and other personal ornaments of modern filigree are generally surrounded and subdivided by bands of square or flat metal, giving consistency to the filling up, which would not otherwise keep its proper shape.


title: Filigree

text: "Filigree" has been used metaphorically as a term for intricate ornamental designs in a number of other contexts, including larger-scale metalwork such as wrought iron or cast iron pieces such as railings and balustrades. In Polish, the term "filigranowy" or "filigranowa" (lit. "filigree") is used to describe people with a petite body.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The New Flemish Alliance (, N-VA) is a Flemish nationalist and conservative political party in Belgium. The party was founded in 2001 by the right-leaning fraction of the centrist-nationalist People's Union (VU).


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The N-VA is a regionalist and separatist movement that self-identifies with the promotion of civic nationalism. It is considered part of the Flemish Movement; the party strives for the peaceful and gradual secession of Flanders from Belgium. In recent years it has become the largest party of Flanders as well as of Belgium as a whole, and it participated in the 2014–18 Belgian Government until 9 December 2018.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The N-VA was established as a centre-right party with the main objective of working towards furthering Flemish autonomy and redefining Belgium as a confederal country through gradually obtaining more powers for both Belgian communities separately with the belief that this will pave the way for eventual Flemish independence. During its early years, the N-VA mostly followed the platform of the former People's Union by characterising itself as a big tent party combining policies from the left and right with Flemish nationalism as its central theme. Furthermore, it emphasized a pragmatic and non-revolutionary image (as opposed to the far-right character of the Vlaams Belang) in order to legitimise increased Flemish autonomy. The party also espoused non-interventionalist and pro-individual freedom messages in its original platform.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In subsequent years, the N-VA moved to the right and has adopted a distinctly conservative identity under the leadership of Bart De Wever, who succeeded the founding leader Geert Bourgeois. The party is also known for its insistence on the exclusive use of Dutch, Flanders' sole official language, in dealings with government agencies, and for the promotion of the use of Dutch in Flanders. The N-VA advocates free-market economics and immediate tax reductions to stimulate the economy. It also supports stricter law and order and controlled immigration policies. The party previously advocated deepening ties with the European Union, but have since shifted to a more "Eurorealist" or "Eurocritical" stance.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: Since the 2014 European elections, the New Flemish Alliance has sat with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary group in the European Parliament.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The N-VA stems from the right-leaning faction of the People's Union (, VU), a Belgian political party and broad electoral alliance of Flemish nationalists from both sides of the political spectrum. Towards the end of the 20th century, with a steadily declining electorate and the majority of the party's federalist agenda implemented, friction between several wings of the People's Union emerged. In the beginning of the 1990s, Bert Anciaux became party president and led the party in an ever more progressive direction, combining the social-liberal and social democratic ideas of his iD21-movement with the regionalist course of the People's Union. These experiments were opposed by the more traditional right-wing party base. Many of the VU's more ardent national-conservative members defected to the Vlaams Blok after becoming disgruntled with direction of the party, prompting a further decline in support. Around this time, VU member Geert Bourgeois, de facto leader of the VU's traditionalist and centre-right nationalist wing, put together the so-called "Oranjehofgroep" (which would go on to become the bedrock of the N-VA) which included fellow VU members Frieda Brepoels, Eric Defoort, Ben Weyts and Bart De Wever. The Oranjehofgroep opposed the direction in which the party was being taken by Anciaux and wanted the VU to pursue a more conservative, Flemish nationalist and separatist direction, while the wing helmed by Anciaux was looking to merge the Volksunie with its progressive programme with another political party.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: Tension rose towards the end of the decade, as Geert Bourgeois was elected chairman by party members, in preference to the incumbent and progressive Patrik Vankrunkelsven who belonged to the iD21 wing. Factions subsequently clashed multiple times, over the future course of the party and possible support for current . On 13 October 2001 the party openly split into three factions: the progressive wing around Bert Anciaux, which would later become the Spirit party; the conservative nationalist wing around Geert Bourgeois; and a centrist group opposing the imminent split. An internal referendum was held on the future course of the party. The right wing gained a substantial plurality of 47% and inherited the party infrastructure. Since no faction got an absolute majority, however, the name "Volksunie" could no longer be used under Belgian constitutional law and the VU was dissolved. The centre-right orientated faction of the VU went on to found the N-VA while the remaining centre-left faction reorganized itself as Spirit and the centrist-liberal wing mostly folded into the Open VLD.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the autumn of 2001, the New Flemish Alliance (, N-VA) was officially registered. Seven members of parliament from the People's Union joined the new party. The new party council created a party manifesto and a statement of principles. The first party congress was held in May 2002, voting on a party program and permanent party structures. Geert Bourgeois was elected chairman. The N-VA initially continued some of the VU's former policies.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The party participated in elections for the first time in the 2003 federal elections, but struggled with the election threshold of 5%. This threshold was only reached in West Flanders, the constituency of Geert Bourgeois. With only one federal representative and no senator, the party lost government funding and faced irrelevance.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In February 2004, the N-VA entered into an electoral alliance, commonly known in Belgium as a cartel, with the Christian Democratic and Flemish (CD&V) party, the traditionally largest party, which was then in opposition. They joined forces in the regional elections in 2004 and won. Both parties joined the new Flemish government, led by CD&V leader Yves Leterme. Geert Bourgeois became a minister, and Bart De Wever became the new party leader in October 2004.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The cartel was briefly broken when the former right-wing liberal Jean-Marie Dedecker left the Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats (Open VLD) and entered the N-VA on behalf of the party executive. However, the party congress did not put Dedecker on the election list, instead preferring to continue the cartel with CD&V, who had strongly opposed placing him on a joint cartel list. Dedecker saw this as a vote of no confidence, and left the party after only 10 days, to form his own party, List Dedecker (LDD). Deputy leader Brepoels, who supported Dedecker, stepped down from the party board afterwards.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the Belgian federal election of 2007 the CD&V/N-VA cartel won a major victory again, with a campaign focusing on good governance, state reform and the division of the electoral district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. The N-VA won five seats in the Chamber of Representatives and two seats in the Senate. Yves Leterme initiated coalition talks, which repeatedly stalled (see 2007–2008 Belgian government formation). On 20 March 2008, a new federal government was finally assembled. N-VA did not join this government, but gave its support pending state reform.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The cartel ended definitively on 24 September 2008, due to lack of progression in state reform matters and a different strategy on future negotiations. N-VA left the Flemish Government and gave up its support of Leterme at the federal level.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the regional elections of June 2009, N-VA won an unexpected 13% of the votes, making them the winner of the elections, along with their old cartel partner CD&V. N-VA subsequently joined the government, led by Kris Peeters (CD&V). Bart De Wever chose to remain party leader and appointed Geert Bourgeois and Philippe Muyters as ministers in the Flemish Government and Jan Peumans as speaker of the Flemish Parliament.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In December 2018, a political crisis emerged over whether to sign the Global Compact for Migration; N-VA was against this, whereas the other three parties in the federal government supported it. On 4 December 2018, the Prime Minister of Belgium, Charles Michel, announced that the issue would be taken to parliament for a vote. On 5 December, parliament voted 106 to 36 in favor of backing the agreement. Michel stated that he would endorse the pact on behalf of parliament, not on behalf of the divided government. Consequently, N-VA quit the federal government; the other three parties continue as a minority government (Michel II).


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: During the 2019 federal elections the party again polled in first place in the Flemish region but saw a decline in vote share for the first time, falling to 25.6% of the Flemish vote.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The New Flemish Alliance is a relatively young political party, founded in the autumn of 2001. Being one of the successors of the Volksunie (1954–2001), it is, however, based on an established political tradition. The N-VA works towards the same goal as its predecessor: to redefine Flemish nationalism in a contemporary setting. Party leader De Wever calls himself a conservative and a nationalist. The N-VA has previously argued for a Flemish Republic as a member state of a democratic European confederation. In its initial mission statement, the party stated that the challenges of the 21st century can best be answered by strong communities and by well-developed international co-operation, a position which reflected in their tagline: "Necessary in Flanders, useful in Europe." (.)


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: During the N-VA's early years a label for the political orientation for the party was difficult to find. Borrowing from its People's Union predecessor, the N-VA was initially considered a big tent or catch-all party and a socially liberal nationalist movement that combined left- and right-wing policies, and a focus on individual responsibility. The N-VA also summed up its initial platform with the slogan "evolution, not revolution," arguing for a more pragmatic approach to Flemish nationalism by pursuing gradual independence for Flanders through reforms and increased autonomy for both the Flemish and Walloon regions of Belgium. This strategy assumed that through successive transfers of powers from the federal level to both regions on the one hand, and the European Union on the other, the Belgian state will gradually become obsolete. The party's early platform also supported pacifist politics and the non-aggression principle.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In its 2009 election programme, the N-VA described itself as economically liberal and ecologically green. The party supported public transport, open source software, renewable energy and taxing cars by the number of kilometres driven. It wanted more aid for developing countries and more compulsory measures to require that immigrants learn Dutch.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: The party has generally been supportive of LGBT rights by backing same-sex marriage and relaxing laws for gay couples to adopt. It calls for measures to protect weaker members of society but also robust welfare reform to encourage people into work and reduce unemployment. The N-VA also supports abolishing the Belgian Senate.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In recent years, the N-VA has shifted from a big tent to an avowedly conservative party by basing some of its socio-economic policies on that of the British Conservative Party. Political scientist Glen Duerr has described the N-VA's current position as evolving to somewhere between that of Vlaams Belang and CD&V.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: Since 2014, the N-VA has been described as continuing to move ideologically further to the right under the influence of Bart De Wever and Theo Francken by adopting tougher stances on immigration, integration of minorities, requirements to obtain Belgian citizenship, law and order, national security and repatriation of foreign born criminals and illegal immigrants. In 2015, German weekly Die Zeit published a list of 39 successful radical political parties in Europe. The paper described N-VA as right-wing populist and separatist because it reduces complex political problems to territorial issues. N-VA responded that "foreign media find the party difficult to place, so they just label us as extremists." In 2018, the party opposed the UN Global Compact for Migration and subsequently withdrew its participation in the Belgian government in protest of its passing. Some commentators have attributed these shifts as a response to a revival in support for the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang, which also campaigned against the Migration Compact. In contrast to other Belgian parties, the N-VA is more critical of the "cordon sanitaire" placed on Vlaams Belang and recently has been more open to negotiating with the party (although accepting former Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang members as defectors into the N-VA still remains controversial within some ranks of the party).


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In terms of foreign policy, the N-VA's stance on the European Union began as strongly pro-European in character (which it regarded as an important means of gaining legitimacy for Flemish nationalism on an international stage) and in 2010 the party called for "an ever stronger and more united Europe." However, the party has since moved in a Eurocritical direction and takes a more critical stance on European integration by no longer endorsing a European confederation, calling for less EU interference at national decision making levels, more democratic reform of the EU and arguing that economically unstable nations should leave the Eurozone. The party is critical of the EU's stance on illegal immigration (in particular its handling of the migrant crisis) and the role played by NGOs in picking up migrants. The N-VA argues that the EU should emulate the Australian model of border protection to reinforce its external border and work with nations outside of Europe to stem the flow of illegal migrants arriving by sea.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: At European level, the N-VA is part of the European Free Alliance (EFA), a European political party consisting of regionalist, pro-independence and minority interest political parties, of which the People's Union was a founder member. During the 7th European Parliament of 2009–2014, the N-VA was a member of The Greens–European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) group in the European Parliament. However, following the 2014 European elections, the N-VA announced it was moving to a new group and chose the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) over the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the federal elections in 2003 N-VA received 3.1% of the votes, but won only one seat in the federal parliament. In February 2004 they formed an electoral alliance (cartel) with the Christian Democratic and Flemish party (CD&V). The cartel won the elections for the Flemish Parliament. The N-VA received a total of 6 seats. However, on 21 September 2008 the N-VA lost its faith in the federal government and the following day minister Geert Bourgeois resigned. In a press conference he confirmed the end of the CD&V/N-VA cartel.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the 10 June 2007 federal elections, the cartel won 30 out of 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and 9 out of 40 seats in the Senate.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the regional elections of 11 June 2009, N-VA (now on its own after the split of the cartel with CD&V) won an unexpected 13% of the votes, making them the winner of the elections along with their former cartel partner. In the 2009 European elections held on the same day, the N-VA had one MEP elected.


title: New Flemish Alliance

text: In the 2014 federal elections, N-VA increased their dominant position, taking votes and seats from the far-right Flemish Interest. In the simultaneous 2014 regional elections and 2014 European elections, the N-VA also became the largest party in the Flemish Parliament and in the Belgian delegation to the European Parliament.