Animal Cognition

Question 1

Anthropomorphism

Answer 1

attributing human characteristics to animals

Question 2

Anthropocentrism

Answer 2

viewing animals from our own, human, perspective

Question 3

Mind/mental life:

Answer 3

behaviours and operations (including perception, simple behaviour, complex cognitions)
Thought
•Intelligence: rank ordering? problem solving
•Cognition: behaviour

Question 4

Darwin’s mechanism for evolution

Answer 4

Variation (many offspring, which are variable) = Selection (some offspring survive to reproduce)
The outcome is adaptation (animal’s suitability to environment)
Behaviour and psychology also subject to evolution

Will be commonalities between species

Comparative psychology

Question 5

George Romanes

Answer 5

Animal intelligence, 1882
•Collection of anecdotes about intelligent behaviour

Now… Animals differ in their intelligence, one is not more intelligent than the other

Question 6

Conwy Lloyd Morgan

Answer 6

Could open a gate

Reasoning vs trial and error

Performance improved over time = trial and error learning

Question 7

Lloyd Morgan’s canon

Answer 7

1894
“In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”

Find the simplest explanation

Question 8

Further developments…

Thorndike 1898, 1911

Answer 8

Experimental methods used in studies of animals

Question 9

Tinbergen 1963

Answer 9

4 questions 
Function
Phylogeny (evolution)
Ontology (development)
Mechanism

Question 10

Clever Hans

Answer 10

Able to answer questions (e.g., arithmetic)
Hans was responding to external signs…
But… “the horse–in so far as it was at all possible to decide–never looked at the persons or the objects which he was to count, or at the words which he was to read, yet he nevertheless gave the proper responses.” (Pfungst, 1911).
Presence of experimenters is important to think about in animal studies
(experimenter should not be sensed or should be blind to answers)

Question 11

Perceptual worlds

Answer 11

Perceptual abilities vary between species

The world you experience is due to the processing ability of your brain

This is important when researching animal behaviour

Question 12

Vision

Colour

Answer 12

•Humans have 3 colour receptors (blue, green, red)
•Other species can see more of the spectrum than humans
•Bees: green, blue, ultraviolet (see Hempel de Ibarra, Vorobyev, & Menzel, 2014)
•Birds: e.g., blue tits perceive UV
(Hunt et al., 1998),
pigeons have >6 colour receptors

Question 13

Vision

Polarization

Answer 13

• Orientation of the oscillation of the waves
• Some animals can detect this and use it as a compass – polarization of light changes with the position of the sun.
• This even works on cloudy days
• Shown that many invertebrates are sensitive (see next lecture) & some birds and fish

Question 14

Smell

Answer 14

Survival: Find food, avoid predators
Communication: define home range,
attracting mates, recognising
individuals,

Dogs
Can identify an individual odour in mixtures of odours (< 11 odours in a mixture with 100% success).
Detection of illegal substances, food, explosives, disease (cancer; Jezierski, Walczak, & Gorecka, 2009)

Question 15

Smell

Answer 15

Video (4 mins)
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2017

Answer these questions:
What is the name of the chemical that is used for intraspecies communication
What is a danger of sending signals?

Question 16

Hearing

Answer 16

Barn owls (Konishi see Takahashi, 2010)
Uses sound localisation to catch prey

Echolocation
Bats – produce sound and listen to echoes
Flying in the dark, tracking and catching prey

Question 17

Magnetic sensitivity

Answer 17

Many animals have shown to be sensitive to magnetic fields: pigeons, bats, migrating fish, bees, ants, cattle, sea turtles

Sea turtles (Lohmann et al., 2004)
Turtles can distinguish different
locations by the magnetic field

Question 18

Methodology in experiments

Answer 18

Imagine you wanted to investigate spatial memory in guinea pigs

What would you need to know about guinea pigs?
What method would you use?
What would you measure?

Question 19

Methodology

Answer 19

Domestic guinea pigs vs wild cavies

Water maze

Guinea pigs better on probe trial