Jef's web files - Animal cognition

Animal cognition

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:06:30 -0400

Animal cognition

Photos Reveal First Tool Usage in Wild Gorillas

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:01:51 -0400

For the first time ever, scientists have observed and photographed wild gorillas using tools, in one instance employing a stick to test the depth of a pool before wading into it, according to a study by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other organizations. Up to this point, all other species of great apes, including chimpanzees and orangutans, have been observed using tools in the wild, but never gorillas.

“This is a truly astounding discovery,” said Thomas Breuer of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Tool usage in wild apes provides us with valuable insights into the evolution of our own species and the abilities of other species. Seeing it for the first time in gorillas is important on many different levels.”

Friendly foxes are cleverer

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 22:50:03 -0500

Domesticated foxes show evolution of social intelligence.

For almost half a century, a population of foxes in Siberia has been bred to be unafraid of humans and non-aggressive. Now these foxes seem to have shown that social skills come as a perk of being friendly.

Dogs, domesticated from their wild wolf cousins over millennia, are not only less likely to bite or bolt, but have also gained the ability to communicate with their human companions. For example, if a human points or looks at an object, the dog will also look at it.

Brian Hare, an anthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had previously shown that dogs are more likely than undomesticated animals - even chimps - to be able to communicate in this way with humans. But was this social sophistication something that was specifically bred for during their domestication, or was it a by-product?

Who let the dogs out?

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:26:22 -0400

The world may be at war but the great affairs of state have taken a back seat this morning to a new British Hero. Hairy Houdini, the Grrrreat Escape, scream the headlines.

London’s Battersea Dogs Home finally has the answer to the question: "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

The answer is Red -- a former stray, mostly Greyhound, mixed breed, who’s learned a thing or two in the time he’s been waiting for a new home. He’s learned how to flip the latch on his cage—from the inside.

And Red—being an equal opportunity doggy escape artist—then methodically went about freeing all his friends.

Researchers Find That Color Perception Is Not Innate, But Acquired After Birth

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 12:17:29 -0400

Rearing experimental animals under special illumination, researchers have found new evidence that early visual experience is indispensable for the development of normal color perception.

The wavelength composition of the light reflected from an object changes considerably in different conditions of illumination. Nevertheless, the color of the object remains the same. This property, so-called "color constancy," is the most important property of the color visual system. It has been unclear based on previous work whether the attribute of color constancy is innate or acquired after birth.

In work reported this week, researcher Yoichi Sugita of the Neuroscience Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan, shows that visual experience in early infancy is indispensable for normal development of the color constancy. He raised baby monkeys for nearly a year in a separate room where the illumination came from only monochromatic lights. After extensive training afterwards, the monkeys were able to perform color matching tasks, but their judgment of color similarity was quite different from that of normal animals. Furthermore, they had severe deficits in color constancy; their color vision was very much wavelength-dominated, such that they were unable to compensate for the changes in wavelength composition. These results indicate that early visual experience is indispensable for normal color perception.

Animals reveal themselves to be dedicated followers of fashion

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 11:13:08 -0400

Being fashion-conscious is not confined to humans, research has shown.

Animals copy one another when making choices about places to live, where to eat and acquiring a mate.

Such behaviour allows the rapid transmission of non-genetic traits, giving rise to a form of "cultural evolution".

Researchers reviewed the evidence for animal fashion in the edition of the journal Science that appears today.

The team, led by Etienne Danchin, from the CNRS research institution in Paris, wrote: "Psychologists, economists and advertising moguls have long known that human decision-making is strongly influenced by the behaviour of others.

"A rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that the same is true in animals ... Public information can lead to cultural evolution, which we suggest may then affect biological evolution."

'Doggie, Speak' Has New Meaning in Language Study

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 16:52:26 -0400

A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday.

The dog, named Rico, can fetch a newly introduced object when asked, even if he has never heard the name of the object before, the researchers say.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, may not surprise many dog owners. But they are certain to re-ignite a debate over what language is and whether it is unique to humans.

Sneakiest primates have biggest brains

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 15:09:32 -0400

Monkeys and apes who are good at deceiving their peers also have the biggest brains relative to their body size. The finding backs the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fuelled the evolution of large primate brains.

Of all the terrestrial mammals, primates have by far the largest brains relative to their body size, with humans having the largest of all. The enlargement is almost exclusively in the neocortex, which makes up more than 80% of the mass of the human brain.

Large brains, despite being energetically costly, benefited primates because they conferred complex cognitive skills. But which skills were the priority - was it clever food-finding strategies that were most valuable, for example, or complex social skills?

Monkey Think, Monkey Do?

Sun, 30 May 2004 13:06:39 -0400

The answer to the title question of Clive Wynne’s book, Do Animals Think?, is: Not very much. I mention this right off the bat not only to dispel unnecessary suspense but because Wynne, a University of Florida psychology prof and the author of an earlier textbook on animal cognition, writes so charmingly about the behaviour of honeybees, bats, pigeons, and dolphins that one almost forgets that for considerable stretches of Do Animals Think? he says very little about thinking at all.

But his survey of what we do and don’t know about non-human animal thinking and doing is a useful antidote to widespread sentimentality about what goes on in the brains of birds, beasts, and the rest of us. Students in the first-year university philosophy classes that I teach often believe that their dogs, cats, budgies, and goldfish are thinking pretty much the same thoughts they are. Unfortunately, some of them are right, I point out—but I point it out only when I’m in a grumpy mood.

Brains and the Beast

Sun, 30 May 2004 12:58:07 -0400

If your dog drops a tennis ball in front of you and looks up at you with tail wagging, do you figure she wants to play? How naive! Who says dogs have desires and intentions? Her behavior is merely the product of reinforcement: she has been rewarded for it in the past.

Many scientists have grown up with the so-called law of effect, the idea that all behavior is conditioned by reward and punishment. This principle of learning was advocated by a dominant school of twentieth-century psychological thought known as American behaviorism. The school’s founders, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, were happy to explain all conceivable behavior within the narrow confines of what Skinner called “operant conditioning.” The mind, if such a thing even existed, remained a black box. In the early days, the behaviorists applied their doctrine in equal measure to people and other animals. Watson, for instance, to demonstrate the power of his methods, intentionally created a phobia for furry objects in a human baby. Initially “little Albert” was unafraid of a tame white rat. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rat with sharp noises right behind poor Albert’s head, fear of rats was the inevitable outcome. Even human speech was thought to be the product of simple reinforcement learning.

The behaviorists’ goal of unifying the science of behavior was a noble one—but alas, outside academia the masses resisted. They stubbornly refused to accept that their own behavior could be explained without considering thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Don’t we all have mental lives, don’t we look into the future, aren’t we rational beings? Eventually, the behaviorists caved in and exempted the bipedal ape from their theory of everything.

Quoth the raven

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 20:01:47 -0400

Now, it seems, even the bird-brained have theories of mind

Humans like to regard themselves as exceptional. Other animals do not have complex, syntactical languages. Nor do most of them appear to enjoy the same level of consciousness that people do. And many philosophers believe humans are the only species which understands that others have their own personal thoughts. That understanding is known in the trade as having a “theory of mind”, and it is considered the gateway to such cherished human qualities as empathy and deception.

Biologists have learned to treat such assertions with caution. In particular, they have found evidence of theories of mind in a range of mammals, from gorillas to goats. But two recent studies suggest that even mammalian studies may be looking at the question too narrowly. Birds, it seems, can have theories of mind, too.

Featherbrains

In the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar of the University of Vermont, in Burlington, describe a series of experiments they have carried out on ravens. They wanted to see how these birds, which are known to be (at least by avian standards) both clever and sociable, would respond to human gaze.

Current Issues and Emerging Theories in Animal Cognition

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 01:08:23 -0400

Comparative cognition is an emerging interdisciplinary field with contributions from comparative psychology, cognitive/experimental and developmental psychology, animal learning, and ethology, and is poised to move toward greater understanding of animal and human information-processing, reasoning, memory, and the phylogenetic emergence of mind. This chapter highlights some current issues and discusses four areas within comparative cognition that are yielding new approaches and hypotheses for studying basic conceptual capacities in nonhuman species. These include studies of imitation, tool use, mirror self-recognition, and the potential for attribution of mental states by nonhuman animals. Though a very old question in psychology, the study of imitation continues to provide new avenues for examining the complex relationships among and between the levels of imitative behaviors exhibited by many species. Similarly, recent work in animal tool use, mirror self-recognition (with all its contentious issues), and recent attempts to empirically study the potential for attributional capacities in nonhumans, all continue to provide fresh insights and novel paradigms for addressing the defining characteristics of these complex phenomena.

KEY WORDS: comparative psychology, imitation, tool use, self-recognition, theory of mind, animal behavior

Why humans are superior to apes

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:10:09 -0400

Humanism, in the sense of a faith in humanity's potential to solve problems through the application of science and reason, is taking quite a battering today. As the UK medical scientist Raymond Tallis warns, the role of mind and of self-conscious agency in human affairs is denied 'by anthropomorphising or "Disneyfying" what animals do and "animalomorphising" what human beings get up to' (1).

One of the most extreme cases of 'animalomorphism' in recent years has come from the philosopher John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. In his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Gray argues that humanity's belief in our ability to control our destiny and free ourselves from the constraints of the natural environment is as illusory as the Christian promise of salvation (2).

Girl chimps learn faster than boys

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 09:23:00 -0400

Young female chimpanzees are better students than males, at least when it comes to catching termites, according to a study of wild chimps in Tanzania's Gombe National Park. While daughters watch their mothers closely, the boys spend more time monkeying around.

The discovery mirrors differences in the learning abilities of human children, says the research team behind the study. Girls tend to catch on faster than boys when learning skills such as writing and drawing, they say.

Tyson, the skateboarding bulldog

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 15:56:50 -0400

Here's video and pictures of a bulldog who skateboards, and clearly enjoys it.