Animal learning and cognition

Question 1

What is comparative psychology?

Answer 1

How do different species differ in their psychological abilities/processes?

Psychology is a science in which behavioural and other evidence is used to understand the internal processes leading people (and members of other species) to behave as they do (Eysenck, 2004)

Question 2

What were Darwin’s (1859) 4 postulates? (On the origin of species by natural selection)

Answer 2

• There is variability among individuals in a population
• Variability is hereditary
• More offspring are born than can survive, and there is competition among individuals for resources
• The survivors of the competition will reproduce

Question 3

Did Darwin say there was a difference between the evolution of humans and the evolution of other animals?

Answer 3

No

Question 4

Did Darwin say there was a difference between behaviour and other evolved traits?

Answer 4

No

Question 5

What other disciplines does animal cognition relate to?

Answer 5

Human cognitive psychology
Behavioural neuroscience
Artificial intelligence and computational modelling
Clinical psychology

Question 6

What did Romanes (1881) believe?

Answer 6

Romanes concluded that animals were rational, empathetic, reasoning creatures with many facets to their intellectual abilities. Romanes saw a simple progression in the intellectual capabilities of animals by what he supposed to be their position on an evolutionary scale.
(Anecdotal evidence)
Romanes’ anthropomorphism – the
tendency to view animals as people or to have the same capabilities, motivations and
desires as humans

Question 7

What did Conway Lloyd Morgan (1890s) believe?

Answer 7

Against Romanes’ anthropomorphism
Lloyd Morgan’s Canon (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
one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”

Question 8

Who first conducted experiments on animal intelligence?

Answer 8

Edward Thorndike - studied learning specifically

Question 9

What did Thorndike believe? (Cat experiments)

Answer 9

Wanted to deliver
“the coup de grace to the despised notion that animals reason”

He studied cats’ ability to escape from modified orange crates called puzzle-boxes over successive trials. The boxes contained various mechanisms that the animals had to manipulate in order to escape.
Thorndike found that with increasing numbers of trials the cats became quicker to escape. However, there was no sudden decrease in the cats’ escape times, as would be expected if they gained some sudden insight, or had used reasoning, to discover how the escape mechanism worked.
Thorndike concluded that the animals had learned by trial-and error (stimulus-response association), not by reasoning.

Question 10

What is Thorndike’s Law of Effect?

Answer 10

States that:
‘If a response leads to a satisfying outcome it will be strengthened’

Question 11

What did John Watson believe?

Answer 11

John B Watson (1878-1958) emphasised the importance of learning in human behaviour.
Rejected introspection, supported behaviourism - only observable phenomena
Advocated use of animals, since their behaviour could also be measured.
Watson’s behaviourism movement became the basis on which cognition in animals
and humans is studied to this day.

Question 12

What did Titchener believe?

Answer 12

Went to Wundt’s lab with a version of structuralism
Concerned with conscious experience of stimuli involving introspection

Question 13

What did Skinner believe?

Answer 13

“The major problems of the world today can be solved only if we improve our understanding of human behavior” About Behaviorism (1974)

Added experimentation to Watson’s behaviourist views, and provided the technology and techniques necessary to conduct well controlled experiments
Experiments on rats and pigeons

Rejection of being able to study internal processes scientifically - only focussing on behaviour
Rats and pigeons - easy to keep in laboratories and readily available

Question 14

What is response shaping? (Skinner)

Answer 14

He developed a technique he called Response
Shaping to train his animals to perform a particular behaviour to gain a reward.

Question 15

What are schedules of reinforcement? (Skinner)

Answer 15

Developed schedules of reinforcement to keep animals performing a trained response without always receiving a reward

Question 16

What are fixed and variable schedules of reinforcement?

Answer 16

Fixed (i.e., the first response after a fixed amount of time (Interval) or responses (Ratio) is reinforced)
Variable (i.e., the time or number of responses varies, but on average they equate to a certain number)

Question 17

What are interval and ratio schedules of reinforcement?

Answer 17

Presenting a reinforcer after a certain amount of time = interval
Presenting a reinforcer after a certain number
of responses = ratio

Question 18

What is the skinner box/ conditioning chamber?

Answer 18

Levers could be pressed, or keys could be pecked in response to certain cues in order to gain a food reward.
These conditioning chambers are very versatile and are still used to control experiments with
animals

Question 19

What is instrumental conditioning? (Operant)

Answer 19

The type of learning in which a particular response would lead to a reward

Question 20

Is the outcome of a stimulus-response connection represented in animals? (Thorndike’s Law of Effect)

Answer 20

If a response leads to a satisfying outcome
it will be strengthened
The outcome (O) only strengthens or weakens the connection between S and R, and the outcome itself is not represented in animals on making the instrumental response.

Question 21

What is response shaping? (Colwill and Rescorla)

Answer 21

Can animals represent the outcome of their behaviours?
Is it just stimulus response - see the lever and press the lever?

Animals either pressed a lever which gave them food which made them ill, or pulled a chain which gave them sucrose which did not make them ill

As a result, animals pulled the chain much more than they pulled the lever

Question 22

What is fixed interval reinforcement?

Answer 22

Always 30 seconds - animal recognises this and increases pressing at each 30 second mark
- Exams - start cramming just before

Question 23

What is variable interval reinforcement?

Answer 23

On average every 30 seconds but could vary - animal has a steady pattern of responding
- Scrolling on social media until you find something good

Question 24

What is fixed ratio reinforcement?

Answer 24

Every 30 presses
- Working until you produce a full product which you get payed for, then taking a break before starting again

Question 25

What is variable ratio reinforcement?

Answer 25

On average every 30 presses but could vary
Gambling - don’t know when you’ll get rewarded so quickly keep pressing

Question 26

What is Pavlovian or Classical conditioning?

Answer 26

CS = conditioned stimulus (light)
US = unconditioned stimulus (food)
UR = unconditioned response (salivation)
CR = conditioned response (salivation)

Didn’t actually ever really use a bell - used more controlled stimuli like metronomes
Skinner = doing
Pavlov = predicting

Question 27

How was classical conditioning shown in the patella reflex - Edwin B. Twitmyer?

Answer 27

Even when hammer didn’t hit knee, reflex still happened because person associated noise with hammer

Question 28

What is extinction?

Answer 28

Conditioned stimulus alone - response is extinguished
Extinction not due to forgetting, due to new association with the conditioned stimulus and no response

Question 29

What is spontaneous recovery?

Answer 29

If you wait 24 hours after bell not being associated with food there is a bounce back - a spontaneous recovery of conditioned responding

Question 30

What is stimulus generalisation?

Answer 30

The more similar a stimulus is to trained stimulus, the bigger the response

Question 31

What was Rachman’s (1996) sexual fetishism study?

Answer 31

UCS = pornography
UCR = arousal
CS = leather boot
CR = arousal

Measured with thismograph

Question 32

What is the generalisation gradient and generalisation decrement? (Pavlov)

Answer 32

Pavlov also showed that the conditioned response was sensitive to theproperties of the conditioned stimulus. For example, if a tone of 1200 Hz was used as the conditioned stimulus then conditioned responding was maximal when
a 1200 Hz tone was presented. However, there would also be a high CR when 1000 and 1400 Hz tones were presented, although responding would be lower than the maximum produced with a 1200Hz CS. There was lower responding as
the frequency of the tone deviated more from the CS. Plotted on a graph this is
known as a Generalisation gradient and is the result of Stimulus generalisation.
When conditioned responding is lower due to a slight difference between the
trained CR and the presented CR (such as a change from 1200 to 1000Hz) this is
known as Generalisation decrement.

Question 33

What is Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being?

Answer 33

• Increasing complexity of animals led them to be more intelligent
• In terms of whether animals had blood, how many legs they had etc

Question 34

What is the evolutionary explanation of animal intelligence? What contradicts this?

Answer 34

• Simpler forms of life gave way to more complex forms - these were more intelligent
• As if intelligence has a purpose to improve on previous forms
• Continuity between species - linear form with humans the most intelligent and invertebrates the least
  However this is a gross oversimplification - animals don’t involve in a sequence and evolution does not have a purpose

Hinde and Stevenson-Hinde (1973) - because of the time scale of evolution, there must be multiple chances for intelligence to evolve

Clayton and Emery (2005) - ‘feathered apes’ crow problem-solving - species of crow are as intelligent as some apes and young children

Question 35

How is brain size measured as intelligence and what is a problem of this?

Answer 35

Jerison (1973). The principle of proper mass - the more important a function is, the more of the brain is devoted to it

Animals with different brain sizes have different body sizes as well

Question 36

What is Jerison’s (1973) Cephalization Index (K)?

Answer 36

Brain weight (E)/ body weight (P)

K = E/ P to the power of 2/3

Question 37

What does the cephalization index show the three smartest animals to be?

Answer 37

Human
Dolphin
Chimpanzee

Question 38

As innovation increases, does size of brain increase or decrease?

Answer 38

Increase
Innovation e.g. different ways of foraging or building nests
Brain size may relate more to boldness (low neophobia) than intelligence

Question 39

What is the social intelligence hypothesis?

Answer 39

The larger the group size, the more interactions: larger brains and more intelligent

Question 40

What is the foraging intelligence hypothesis?

Answer 40

Keeping track of how ripe the fruit is - more intelligent

Question 41

How does the hippocampus related to intelligence in birds? (Sherry et al., 1989)

Answer 41

Birds that store food have larger hippocampus in relation to their body size compared to non-storing

Adult birds have larger hippocampus due to experience of storing food

Question 42

What did Macphail (1982) say to do when assuming an animal’s intelligence?

Answer 42

Always have a null hypothesis
Inspired by the Greek
philosopher Anaxogoras who reasoned that all animals were equally intelligent, but that some
were better able to express that intelligence

Question 43

What are problems with using the speed of learning as a measure of intelligence?

Answer 43

Unexpected between-species differences
- Skard (1950) - rats and humans in complex maze - rats were much quicker and finding their way through the maze than humans and made fewer mistakes
- Warren (1965) - goldfish, chickens, cats, horses, monkeys in a stimulus discrimination
- Angermeier (1984) - operant response in various mammals, birds, fish
Papousek (1977) added 5 month-old children
Menzel & Erber (1978) added bees
Results showed exact opposite of predictions from cephalisation index

Question 44

Why do contextual variables pose a problem when comparing intelligence of animals through observing their learning?

Answer 44

Difficult to equate perceptual demands of test
Difficult to equate motivational demands of test - make sure both species will value the reward equally
Bitterman (1975) systematic variation - vary perceptual and motivational demands of the test to limit effect of contextual variables - however this is very time consuming

Question 45

What did Garcia and Koelling (1966) show about some associations being made more readily than others?

Answer 45

Effects of radiation on the brains of animals - Garcia used x rays and lithium chloride to study effects
Saline = salty water:
Illness - small volume drunk
Shock - large volume drunk
LTW = water in presence of lights and tones, only when animal’s tongue makes contact with water
Illness - large volume drunk
Shock - small volume drunk

Reason - certain types of associations are made more readily than others
Internal experience of flavour associated with internal experience of illness
External experience of lights and noises associated with external experience of shock

Question 46

Why is intelligence not a useful term to use with animals?

Answer 46

Because ‘intelligence’ is conflated with the concept of a general IQ (in humans) we tend to avoid the term in relation to animals
We tend to talk about ‘cognition’ instead - processing information
Psychologists tend to think of cognition as the ability to process information in an adaptive way
Cognitive processes can be modelled in terms of computations
Animal cognition as information processing:
- Memory
- Learning
- Reasoning
- Navigation
- Communication

Question 47

What are 4 examples of animal memory?

Answer 47

Capacity
Time
Number
Categories

Question 48

What is a property of animal short term memory?

Answer 48

Habituation

Question 49

What are properties of animal long term memory?

Answer 49

Consolidation theories
Retrieval theories

Question 50

What is animal memory?

Answer 50

When current behaviour is under the influence of past experience

Question 51

What is the capacity of animal memory? (Nutcracker)

Answer 51

Location of Hidden Food
Vander Wall (1982) – Clark’s nutcracker
Nutcracker = foraging bird
- Take pine seeds from pine cones in autumn and store them in locations - difficult for others to find all their food, also difficult for them to find food
- They are much more successful at finding own caches of food than other’s caches - memory is involved

Question 52

What is the capacity of animal memory? (Photographs and pigeons)

Answer 52

Bird pecks at screen - some squiggles are associated with food rewards
80 images associated with food, 80 not - birds could remember and discriminate
Pigeons could also discriminate between very similar photographs when associated with food or no food - 320 images were remembered - animals can have very large capacity for memory

Question 53

What is the circadian clock of animals?

Answer 53

Animals show particular cycle of activity over 24 hours - time of day and amount of light - when to be active, when to seek food, when to rest

Question 54

How can a cockcroach’s circadian clock be affected?

Answer 54

• Roberts glued material over eyes of cockroaches and kept everything else the same - Their circadian rhythms were 23 1/2 hours, continued to get shorter to 15 hours
• When he uncovered eyes, they recovered activity by about an hour a day
  Is this innate or learned?

Question 55

What did Bolles find out about mice circadian rhythms?

Answer 55

Bred mice and let them develop in either 19 or 29 hour cycle of daylight - even though they got used to this they found it very difficult to anticipate when food would be

Question 56

Can animals remember time? (Church and Deluty, 1977; Church and Gibbon, 1982)

Answer 56

• Experiments with rats - trained them to press on a left hand lever for 2 sec tone, right hand lever for tone 16 secs long
• Switched lights off then switched them on, rats would press lever and would only get a reward if lights were off for 4 secs, they on average learned to only press lever if lights had been off for 4 secs

Question 57

What was found out about Clever Hans? (horse) (Animal memory of number)

Answer 57

Clever Hans trained by Von Osten tested by Pfungst (1908)
- Horse could count - knew how many people would be wearing a hat and clopped his hooves to say the number
- Could even do fractions
- If trainer was behind a screen, clever Hans could not answer the question
- He was reacting to the people asking the question and mimicking their behaviour - their anticipation and body language was a cue for the horse
Supports Lloyd Morgan’s canon

Question 58

What was rats’ understandings of number? Meck & Church (1983)

Answer 58

Left or right lever press depending on number of tones presented
Equated length of time to present tones

Changed this to use same length of time and different number of tones and animals could identify number of tones

Question 59

What are monkey’s understandings of number? Brannon & Terrace (2000)

Answer 59

• Trained monkeys to touch screen in correct order (ascending number order)
• Are they learning a number or pattern of dots?
• Changed stimuli so it was not possible to learn a pattern, and monkeys still pressed pictures in correct order - the monkeys could learn the numbers

Question 60

Do five day old chicks have a conception of number? Rugani, Regotin & Vallortigara (2007)

Answer 60

• Food wells in order - trained that a certain food well was always rewarded
• Spatial or number task?
  To test this, they rotated the stimuli by 90 degrees - chicks learnt four from the left or four from the right

Question 61

What could Alex the parrot do? (Pepperberg, 1994)

Answer 61

• Alex the parrot could count number of stimuli and use language to say number
• Could also say categories like colour
  Subitising - not counting just identifying

Question 62

What did Herrnstein, Loveland & Cable (1976)
find out about memory of categories by presenting pictures to pigeons?

Answer 62

Presented pictures to pigeons - some associated with food reward
- Some trained to discriminate trees from non-trees, water and not water, Margaret and not Margaret
Responded more to new pictures containing the thing they had been trained to recognise

Question 63

What did Cerella (1979) find out about categorisation?

Answer 63

Animals could discriminate between oak leaves and non-oak leaves

Question 64

What are explanations for categorisation?

Answer 64

Innate categories
Exemplar learning
Feature learning - learning specific parts of pictures e.g. particular shade of green
Exemplar learning and stimulus generalisation

Question 65

What is habituation in STM?

Answer 65

A reduction in responsiveness to a
stimulus as a result of its repeated presentation

Question 66

What are innate categories in categorisation?

Answer 66

Fodor proposed the possibility of Innate categories that involve no learning.
Face recognition in humans is one example of a proposed innate category – we naturally recognise faces and we do not have to learn to do so.
However, the idea of innate categories is not plausible with some of the examples we have just examined.

Question 67

What is exemplar learning in categorisation?

Answer 67

The animal remembers every instance or exemplar of the category.
Given Herrnstein et al.’s and Cerella’s results with novel items Exemplar learning is not very plausible either.

Question 68

What is feature learning in categorisation?

Answer 68

If a pigeon learns about features that the rewarded slides have in common with each other then it will form a positive association with features that slides share, but neutral associations with features that common to both rewarded and unrewarded slides. If this is how pigeons achieve categorisation then we would not only expect them to transfer performance to novel pictures, but we would expect performance to be as good as during training. In fact we find that while the pigeons are good with new photographs, their performance is not as good as with the training photographs.

Question 69

What is exemplar learning + stimulus generalisation in categorisation?

Answer 69

Stimulus generalisation is when we show a strong conditioned response to items that are similar to the trained stimulus, but as similarity decreases responding drops off.
Exemplar learning with stimulus generalisation does a good job of explaining categorisation, but there is still controversy about which of these accounts is correct.

Question 70

What is effector fatigue?

Answer 70

Effector system - the physiological system responsible for producing a response
This gets tired - habituation

Question 71

What is receptor fatigue?

Answer 71

Receptor system - the physiological system responsible for perceiving the stimulus
This gets tired

Question 72

What is the difference between short and long term memory?

Answer 72

STM lasts for relatively short periods and concerns information about the immediate past. While in this state the information can take part in associative learning, and it may influence the current performance of the animal. LTM is believed to endure for much longer periods of time

Question 73

How can STM be tested in animals?

Answer 73

In order to determine whether or not an animal has retained information about a previously presented stimulus, the experimenter must provide some sort of recognition test. If the subject’s behaviour toward a stimulus should change, after being exposed to it, then this may be due to the existence of a memory of the initial exposure to the stimulus. The exposures could be to the stimulus itself (habituation), or the stimulus could serve as a signal for a biologically important event (conditioning).

Question 74

How did Whitlow (1975) study STM in rabbits?

Answer 74

Whitlow (1975) presented a loud tone to rabbits in a chamber and measured the change of blood flow in their ears in response to each presentation of the tone. He found that on the first presentation (S1) there was a strong response, but on the second presentation (S2), after a 60 second delay, there was a weaker response. If the interval was increased from 60 to 150 seconds the response to S2 was just as high as the response after S1

S1 - Tone 1 = startle
60 secs
S2 - Tone 1 = weak startle (habituation)

S1 - Tone 1 = startle
150 secs
S2 - Tone 1 = startle

Question 75

How does Wagner explain habituation?

Answer 75

Following Whitlow’s experiment, Wagner (1976) explained habituation in terms of memory, saying that the offset of S1 will leave a decaying representation of itself

Question 76

What is Wagner’s model of memory representation?

Answer 76

According to Wagner (1976, 1981) the representation of a stimulus can be in one of three states: two active states, A1 and A2, and one inactive state, in which the memory is not modifiable and is unable to influence the animal’s behaviour.

A1 = short term store
Representation can be thought of as being at the centre of the animal’s attention
As it decays, it moves to the A2 state
A2 = rehearsal
Can be thought to be at the periphery of the animal’s attention.
It then decays to the inactive state
I = long term store
Because of the way Wagner’s model works, a representation in the A2 state cannot move to an A1 state before it has completed its decay to the inactive state
Once in the inactive state the representation can move to the A1 state

Question 77

According to Wagner, what time frame will habituation occur in and why?

Answer 77

If S2 is presented before the decay from A1 to A2 is complete – that is, within 150 seconds – and it matches the representation of S1, then habituation will be observed. However, if the delay between S1 and S2 is longer than 150 seconds, then no habituation is observed, which is what Whitlow found.

Question 78

What are simpler explanations for Whitlow’s data? (Effector fatigue) How did Whitlow counter this?

Answer 78

If the physiological system that is responsible for overt behaviour is fatigued then it will not be able to respond to any stimulus within the period of fatigue.
Whitlow showed that Effector fatigue was not a good explanation for his results by changing the properties of the tone presented at S1 and S2:
While habituation was normal when the same tone was presented at S1 and S2, with a 60 second delay, there was no habituation if different tones were used. Since overt behaviour was not impaired, Effector fatigue could be ruled out.

Question 79

What are simpler explanations for Whitlow’s data? (Receptor fatigue) How did Whitlow counter this?

Answer 79

Cells responsible for the reception of S1 might be fatigued after the offset of S1 and would therefore be less sensitive at the presentation of S2.
If the two tones presented at S1 and S2 are different then different receptors would be involved, but if the two tones at S1 and S2 are the same then the same receptors would be involved to process the two tones.
If these receptors are fatigued then they would be unable to respond appropriately at S2.
To determine whether Receptor fatigue could explain his results, Whitlow presented the same tone at S1 and S2, with a 60 second delay between the two. Mid-way through the delay, however, there was a 2-second distractor – a flashing light and a buzz near the eye. The distractor disrupted habituation, producing dishabituation, consequently showing that S2 is as well perceived as S1, and therefore ruling out Receptor fatigue as an explanation for the original habituation results.
If it was due to receptor fatigue and not habituation, we would expected a lesser response on this experiment.

Question 80

What did the distractor in Whitlow’s experiment produce?

Answer 80

Retroactive interference
The retroactive interference made the animals forget S1, and therefore there was no habituation at S2

Question 81

How is STM tested with the radial arm maze?

Answer 81

In this an animal is allowed to visit four out of eight arms on the maze.
At the end of each visited arm is a food reward. In between each visit to an arm the animal returns to a central hub.
Rats are readily able to complete this task with 8- or 12-arm mazes, but find the task difficult with 17 arms.
The rats could solve the problem of which arms to enter by following a stereotyped route, but observation shows that they don’t do this.
To test how long the memory for previously visited arms lasts, some tests involve removing the animal after it has visited four arms for a short retention interval. When it is replaced into the central hub all eight arms are open and the animal has to avoid the previously visited arms to find food in the remaining arms.

Question 82

How long do rats remember radial arm visits for?

Answer 82

Rats remember these visits for a duration of up to about four hours and a capacity of at least 8 items (Olton, 1978). Memory during the radial maze task seems to be more resilient to retroactive interference than in habituation.

Question 83

How has habituation been studied in sea slugs? (Candel)

Answer 83

Sea slugs release substance when threatened to hide themselves in response to vibrating surface - once habituated to surface, they stop releasing substance

Question 84

What did Betty and Shavalia (1980) find out about rat STM?

Answer 84

Trained rats to complete a normal radial maze task, with a one-hour delay after the fourth arm had been entered. In the interval the rats were required to complete a second radial maze task in a different room. This second task appeared to have no effect on the rats’ memories for the first task, and Roberts (1981) was only able to produce retroactive interference in the radial maze by making the rats complete three distractor radial maze tasks in the interval of the first task.

Question 85

Can the properties of short-term memory can vary according to task?

Answer 85

Yes
The two examples of short-term memory given here (habituation and radial maze) show that the properties of short-term memory can vary according to task.

STM occurs in variety of tasks
STM is decaying memory trace (Wagner)

Question 86

What is the difference between STM during habituation and in the radial arm maze?

Answer 86

Habituation = Short-lasting and susceptible to interference
Radial arm maze = Lasts hours and less susceptible to interference

Question 87

How did Miller and Berk (1977) demonstrate long-term memory in the African Claw-Toed Frog, Xenopus?

Answer 87

This animal undergoes a metamorphosis, over a period of 35 days, from a tadpole to an adult frog. Miller and Berk trained tadpoles to move from a black to a white compartment in order to avoid an electric shock. When tested for their memory of the task after their metamorphosis into frogs, the animals were still able to remember to avoid the black compartment.

Question 88

What are the three mechanisms of LTM in animals?

Answer 88

Consolidation
Retention
Retrieval

Question 89

What do consolidation theorists claim?

Answer 89

Forgetting is due to an inadequate trace being laid down or to the passing of time
Consolidation theorists such as Hebb (1949) and Duncan (1949) claimed that long-term changes in the nervous system must occur for long-term retention of information. According to Hebb memory depends on the virtually permanent formation of circuits of interconnected neurons. Consolidation and rehearsal is needed to complete these connections.

Question 90

What do retrieval theorists claim?

Answer 90

Forgetting is due to the animal’s inability to retrieve the information

Question 91

How do Duncan’s (1949) studies with Electroconvulsive shock (ECS) support consolidation theory?

Answer 91

Support for this idea comes from Duncan’s (1949) studies with Electroconvulsive shock (ECS). He trained rats to move from one end of a box to the other when a light came on in order to avoid a shock. He found that ECS immediately after a trial severely impaired the rats’ ability to remember the significance of the light. One explanation for these findings is that the ECS prevented the consolidation of learning.

Question 92

How did research by Deweer, Sara, and Hars (1980) support Retrieval theory?

Answer 92

Deweer et al. trained rats to run through a maze with six choice points in it. At the beginning of training the rats took 300 seconds to find their way to the end, but by the end they took only 30 seconds. One group of rats were then given a 25-day delay before running the maze again. They took, on average, 150 seconds to find their way to the end. A second group were treated in the same way as the first, with the exception that, just before they were required to run the maze after the 25-day delay, they were placed into a wire mesh cage next to the apparatus for 90 seconds. This treatment apparently had the effect of reactivating the memory because rats in this group took just 40 seconds to run to the end of the maze. This experiment suggests that the reactivation treatment facilitated the retrieval process that consolidation theorists thought unimportant. We can conclude that forgetting from long-term memory occurs for a variety of reasons.

Question 93

What did Holloway and Domjan find out about associative learning/ classical conditioning in birds?

Answer 93

• Light placed above cage where receptive female was - light was signal for a receptive female
• Males would go near the female
  As a result, quails approached the light alone as they associated this with a receptive female, OR because the associated response is to approach the light

Question 94

How did Holland (1990) prove that conditioning is not just associating one thing with another?

Answer 94

Stage 1:
Tone came on = wintergreen
Noise came on = peppermint
Stage 2:
Rat drinks wintergreen without tone, this was mixed with chemical to make them sick and rat became sick
Stage 3:
Tone and sucrose = gaping response aversive reactions (like that with bitter foods)
Noise plus sucrose = lip smacking hedonic reactions (like that with palatable foods)

• He gave rats the tone with sucrose but no flavour, and animals still produced this gaping response
• Rats did not do this with noise and sucrose
• Disproves that conditioning is only associating one thing with another
• Rat is remembering something about perceptual qualities of the stimulus

Question 95

What did Holland and Konorski say about specific and affective qualities of unconditioned stimuli?

Answer 95

USs have Specific and Affective qualities
Affective qualities can be Appetitive or Aversive
- Specific perceptual qualities - make USs different to each other
- Affective qualities - how you feel about something, good = appetitive, bad = aversive

Specific qualities of the US are things that make the US unique – flavour, if the US is food or liquid, where the US is presented, its duration, intensity, etc. Affective qualities are those characteristics that the US has in common with other USs. Food, water, and the opportunity to mate are all things that might be said to lead to a state of satisfaction in the animal, and are collectively called Appetitive USs. Mild electric shocks, illness and loud noises are all things that might be said to be unpleasant stimuli, that the animal might try to avoid if possible, and are therefore known as Aversive USs.

Question 96

How is stimulus substitution shown in pigeons?

Answer 96

Evidence of stimulus substitution - look at autoshaping

Inside conditioning chamber, pigeon sees light, then food is delivered
Light = pavlovian signal for food being delivered
Animal does not have to do anything to receive the food - pavlovian, not instrumental
However, pigeon pecks at light as if it is eating grain, and different beak movement if stimulus is water

In pigeons if a CS is presented for a few seconds before the delivery of a US then over time the bird will start to make CRs (pecks) to the CS. The bird doesn’t have to respond to the CS to gain a reward, but does anyway. This is autoshaping. If the CS signals a US of food then the CR that the pigeon makes looks a lot like it’s pecking at grain. If the CS signals a US of water then the CR looks like the sort of pecks pigeons make to drink. Konorski also said that when the CS activates a representation of the Affective properties of the US then we can expect a Preparatory Response

Question 97

What are the two types of preparatory response in conditioning?

Answer 97

Salivation during CS that signals US
general increase in activity

Conditioned Suppression
decrease in movement

e.g. rat presses lever for reward, CS light comes on and rat stops pressing in preparation for footshock to follow, then starts pressing again

Question 98

What is stimulus substitution?

Answer 98

Konorski said that when the CS activates a representation of the Specific qualities of the US then we can expect the CR to mimic the UR. This is known as Stimulus Substitution.

Question 99

What is drug tolerance and what does it result from?

Answer 99

Tolerance is a decrease in sensitivity to a drug as a result of repeated exposure to it.
This tolerance results from compensatory mechanisms:
Biological:
Metabolic changes
Synaptic changes
Psychological:
Conditioning affects homeostasis mechanisms

• Compensatory mechanism - homeostasis
• Body works to reduce the effects of drug by some metabolic and synaptic changes to get it out of the system and return the body to homeostasis
• If the body can predict changes, conditioning might affect metabolic and synaptic changes

Question 100

What did Siegel (2005) find out about the role of conditioning in drug tolerance?

Answer 100

Injected animals with morphine
Injection = CS
Morphine = UCS
Analgesia = UCR
If animal predicts effect of morphine, CR opposes UCR

When drug was injected in a familiar environment to be under effects of that drug, animals were tolerant, but they were not tolerant in a different environment

Becoming used to environment in which drug is administered, become tolerant to drug

Question 101

What id Crowell, Hinson and Siegel find out about hypothermic effects of alcohol?

Answer 101

• Rats injected with saline or ethanol
• Ethanol - reduces body temp
• Injections of each in room a or b
• Tests - injected again in same or different context
• If expecting ethanol in context a (group 1), increase in body temp should happen - preparatory response
• If expecting saline in context a (group 2), no increase in body temp should happen - no preparatory response

Question 102

What did Newlin (1986) find out about preparatory response to alcohol in humans?

Answer 102

Expecting alcohol but did not get it, their body temperature and blood pressure decreased
- Measured pulse transmission time and skin temperature
(Conditioning = vodka tonic, test = just tonic)

Question 103

What did Siegel (1977) find out about whether drug tolerance is subject to extinction?

Answer 103

• Put rats on hot surface - raised paws up and licked paws
  If they feel effects of morphine they won’t feel pain from heat so it takes longer for them to lift their paws up from the hot surface
• Morphine, saline, Morphine - CS is injecting and is no longer associated with pain relief
• M rest M - Injection always associated with morphine - build tolerance
• M rest M - stay tolerant to morphine
• MPM - gone from being tolerant to being non tolerant as injection no longer predicts effects of morphine
  Extinction - breaking link between CS and US relationship by only presenting CS

Question 104

What is extinction?

Answer 104

Breaking link between CS and US relationship by only presenting CS

Question 105

What does the conditioning model of drug tolerance suggest?

Answer 105

That compensatory CRs will be most evident in contexts associated with drug-taking. Therefore when drugs are taken in unusual contexts the compensatory CR will be less evident and likelihood of overdose is greater

Extinction of drug-taking is context-dependent. Drug users often self-report relapse after returning to normal environment

When drug is taken in novel environment, there is no conditioned compensatory response, so this can much more easily lead to overdose than when in a normal environment

- Build up conditioned response that opposes UCR - environental tolerance opposes effects of drugs
- Take more drugs to get hit that they need because they have become tolerant - either biologically or through learning
- Take large amount of drugs in different environment - higher effect of drugs and could lead to overdose

Question 106

What did Siegel, Hinson, Krank and McCully (1982) find out about rat deaths from heroin?

Answer 106

Much fewer rats died in heroin same group because they built environmental tolerance

Question 107

What is the principle of contiguity?

Answer 107

Events that occur close together in time or space will become readily associated

Conditioning needs to happen close together in time or no association will be made

Shown in og pavlovian conditioning

Question 108

What experiments show an exception to the principle of contiguity? (Smith and Roll, 1967) (Garcia and Koelling, 1966)

Answer 108

• Saccharin (sweet) then given lithium chloride to make them feel ill
  
  • When paired straight away or when they feel ill 8 hours later, rats still learn an aversion to saccharin - sometimes conditioning can happen without continguity (bit of an exception)

Also,
Saline associated with illness but not associated with shock
Light tone water associated with shock but not illness
Even though principle of contiguity was in effect - depends on modalities

Question 109

How did Rescorla’s (1967) truly random control critique contiguity theory?

Answer 109

• Tone and footshock
• Animals only learn to make association if tone preceds the footshock - standard group
• Contingency is as important as contiguity - predictive relationship

Question 110

What is contingency?

Answer 110

A regular predictive relationship between contiguous events (CS-US)

Question 111

What did Kamin (1969) find out about blocking in classical conditioning?

Answer 111

Leon Kamin showed that for conditioning to be successful the US has to be surprising, and not just contiguous with, or contingent on, the CS. The discovery of blocking was the evidence for Kamin’s (1969) belief that the US should be unexpected for learning to occur.

Kamin’s experiment:
Stage 1 - a group of rats (blocking group) learned that a noise (CS) signalled a mild footshock (US).
Stage 2 - a light and the noise were presented in compound, and training continued.
When the rats were tested for the presence of a CR (freezing behaviour) when the light was presented alone, they showed a much lower response than a group that were always trained with the compound CS of a light and a noise (control group). Learning about the significance of the light was said to have been blocked by the previously learned relationship between the noise and the footshock.
Blocking did not occur in a third group of rats (group surprise) that had the same training as the blocking group but in which the footshock was more intense in stage 2 of training.
The results show that for the blocking group, blocking occurred because the US was not unexpected by the rats in stage 2. This was because of their prior training in stage 1.
For group surprise the more intense footshock in stage 2 was unexpected so new learning about the significance of the light occurred. For the control group, whose learning began in stage 2, both the light and the noise signalled an unexpected US, so both were learned about.

Question 112

What did Dickinson, Shanks and Evenden (1984) fins out about associative learning in humans? (Mines and missiles)

Answer 112

• Also seen in humans
• Mines signal tanks to explode
• Then missiles and mines together signal tanks will explode, but people who have already learned the mines and tanks association ignore missiles

Question 113

How does schizophrenia change the blocking effect?

Answer 113

Blocking effect less prevalent in people with schizophrenia

Question 114

What is the mechanism behind latent inhibition?

Answer 114

If some cues are less attended to then learning about them won’t progress as quickly as those that are receiving the animal’s full attention. This seems to be the case in a procedure known as Latent Inhibition (LI).

Question 115

What is the procedure of latent inhibition?

Answer 115

For one group, the experimental group, a light is presented in stage 1 that does not signal an outcome for the animal. In stage 2 the light suddenly becomes a signal for the imminent delivery of food. When compared with a control group that only begin training in stage 2, and always learn that light signals food, the experimental group are slower to learn about the relationship between the light and the food in stage 2. The explanation for this result is that during stage 1 the experimental group learn that the light doesn’t signal anything and come to ignore it. In stage 2 they fail to notice its significance as quickly as the control group, because they’re not paying it any attention, and therefore learn more slowly.

Question 116

What did Wagner (1981) say about what determines whether animals attend to stimuli?
(Three theories of attention)

Answer 116

Attention is high to novel stimuli and attention is low to familiar stimuli

In the LI procedure the light is familiar to the experimental group in stage 2, but is novel to the control group. This accounts for the different rates of learning in the two groups.

Question 117

What did Mackintosh (1975) say about what determines whether animals attend to stimuli?
(Three theories of attention)

Answer 117

Attention is high to novel stimuli
Attention is high to signals for important events
Attention is low to irrelevant stimuli

In LI, for the experimental group the light is novel at first so attention is high, but it is irrelevant in stage 1, so attention to it drops off. In stage 2 the light signals an important event so attention is gradually paid to it, accounting for the fact that the rats do eventually learn the relationship between light and food. However, for the control group the light is both novel and important from the beginning of training, so learning is faster than in the experimental group.

Question 118

What did Pearce-Hall say about what determines whether animals attend to stimuli? (Three theories of attention)

Answer 118

Attention is high while learning about a stimulus
Attention is low once learning is complete

Pearce-Hall made use of some principles of attention in human cognitive psychology and predicted that attention would be high whilst learning about a stimulus is ongoing, but low once learning is complete. This was because, they said, there is a distinction between controlled and automatic processing. In controlled processing deliberate attention must be paid to the task at hand, but once the task is learned the processing becomes automatic, and attention paid to the task is low.

In terms of LI, Pearce-Hall say that attention is high to the light in stage 1 for the experimental group, but that this attention drops off as the rats learn that it signals no outcome. In stage 2 attention is low to the light at first, but when the rats realise that food is delivered attention becomes high again. For the control group attention is high to the light, but once learning about the relationship between light and food is complete attention to the light is low.

Question 119

What was Kaye and Pearce’s (1984) experiment to determine which of the three theories of attention was correct in explaining latent inhibition?

Answer 119

Kaye & Pearce (1984) conducted an experiment with three groups. For Group None a light signalled no outcome. For Group Continuous a light always signalled the delivery of food. For Group Partial the light signalled food on half of the trials, and nothing on the other trials. Kaye & Pearce measured the Orienting Response (OR) of the rats – how often they looked at the light when it was on. The vigour of the OR is thought to provide an index of how much attention is being paid to the light. The results showed that the OR was high for all three groups at first, but that it dropped off for groups None and Continuous, but always remained high for Group Partial. Since Mackintosh says that attention should remain high for important events, the finding that attention decreased for Group Continuous is a bad result for his theory. Wagner says that attention should be low to familiar stimuli, but attention to the light remained high for Group Partial, which is a bad result for him. The only theory that is consistent with the results is Pearce-Hall: once learning is complete for Groups None and Continuous attention is low, and since animals can’t learn what the light signals for Group Partial attention remains high.

Question 120

What are the three theories of attention in associative learning? Which one is most likely to be correct?

Answer 120

Wagner - Attention is high to novel stimuli and attention is low to familiar stimuli

Mackintosh - Attention is high to novel stimuli
Attention is high to signals for important events
Attention is low to irrelevant stimuli

Pearce-Hall - Attention is high while learning about a stimulus
Attention is low once learning is complete
This one is most likely to be correct

Question 121

What is the two-system theory of human conditioning?

Answer 121

There is evidence for both conscious and unconscious processes in human conditioning, so some theorists have suggested a 2-system theory

Question 122

How is evidence for unconscious conditioning shown by Ohman and Soares (1998)?

Answer 122

Got shown a picture of either snake or spider for 30ms (too quickly to consciously process).
Received shock with snake, no shock with spider.
There was shock anticipation with snake even though the picture was presented too quickly to consciously process.

Question 123

How is conditioning shown in smokers (cravings for drugs)?

Answer 123

Anecdotal evidence - smokers often report reduced desire to smoke where smoking is forbidden anyway (e.g., hospitals)

Droungas et al. (1995)
Two groups of smokers shown a video of smoking-related cues.
One group was allowed to smoke and the other was forbidden
Group smoke reported a greater urge to smoke, greater feelings of withdrawal, and were quicker to smoke after the session

Question 124

How is smoking conditioned?

Answer 124

Taste of cigarette happens before the absorption of nicotine

Just the act of picking up or tasting cigarette makes smokers happier even though nicotine has not taken effect

Question 125

How should smoking addiction be treated according to classical conditioning?

Answer 125

Not abstinence - as association still sits there in LTM (abstaining rates are worse for smoking than heroin and alcohol)

Extinction - Removing UCS - association is lost
Removing nicotine from cigarette - taste of cigarette no longer associated with pleasurable nicotine

Or counterconditioning (aversion therapy)
Taste of cigarette becomes associated with nausea due to emetic drugs
CR becomes nausea instead of pleasure

Question 126

What is counterconditioning?

Answer 126

The extinction of a(n undesirable) response through the establishment of an association between the CS and another (more desirable) response
A new CR is established by pairing the CS with a more salient US

Question 127

Does aversion therapy really work to stop drug addiction?

Answer 127

• Successful attempts but usually short term
• In real world, CS can still be associated with pleasure
  Very difficult to remove all originally associated cues

Question 128

What is a phobia?

Answer 128

“Irrational” fear of an “objectively harmless” stimulus

DSM-IV categories:

Agoraphobia - Public places outside home, e.g. shops trains
Social Phobia - Being watched/appraised by other people
Specific Phobia - Grouped into:
- Animals and insects
- Blood/injury/medical (e.g. dentist)
- Situational (e.g. driving, crowds, enclosure, air travel)
- Natural Environment (e.g. heights, water)

Question 129

How can phobias be classically conditioned?

Answer 129

CS = sight of drill
US = pain
CR = anxiety

However, phobias are often to stimuli other than just immediate CS
e.g. just thinking about going to the dentist, not just sight of actual drill

Question 130

What is second-order conditioning?

Answer 130

Some reinforcers aren’t effective from birth. Their value has to be learned, and for this reason they are called secondary or conditioned reinforcers. The obvious example of this in humans is money. Babies would not value money, but as they learn that it can buy them other items, they begins to want it. It ends up having a value of its own to people, even though it’s worthless if not exchanged for something else of value.

Question 131

What is an example of social reinforcement? (Ann)

Answer 131

One example of the use of social reinforcement to change someone’s behaviour is that of Ann, studied by Allen et al. (1964). She was a nursery school child who engaged in a number of odd behaviours, such as talking very quietly, poking and pinching her skin, and talking only to adults. One may conclude Ann was an unhappy and insecure child, but Allen et al. realised such behaviour led to social contact with adults. Instead of reinforcing her strange behaviours with attention Allen et al. instructed teachers only to give Ann attention when she was playing with other children. Within a day her contact with children went from 10 to 60%.

Question 132

Is direct association necessary in phobias?

Answer 132

No
Even without direct experience of a traumatic US or pain-causing CS, humans could form an association via vicarious conditioning, even if the UR is evoked via story-telling

Question 133

What are therapies for phobias? What happened to baby Peter?

Answer 133

Systematic desensitisation (Joseph Wolpe)
Cues associated with anxiety listed and ranked
Relaxation paired with anxiety cues
New association with relaxation reduces effectiveness of cues

Flooding
VR therapies - no real danger

• Baby Peter frightened of furry animals
• Exposed him to animals
• He would observe other children playing happily with animals
• Interrupted by scarlet fever outbreak
• Paired animals with sweets instead of fear
• Once he was in state of relaxation she moved rabbit closer to him - process of desensitisation
  ‘Mother of behaviour therapy’ - Mary Cover Jones

Question 134

What is evidence of phobias being vicariously conditioned in animals?

Answer 134

• Wild rhesus monkeys are fearful of snakes
  Lab reared rhesus monkey observes wild monkey response and produces same fear response

Question 135

What is Skinner’s instrumental conditioning?

Answer 135

Reinforcers - increase tendency to repeat target behaviour
Positive reinforcers
Negative reinforcers
Punishment - decrease tendency to repeat target behaviour

Question 136

What is evidence supporting interesting sensory input as a primary reinforcer?

Answer 136

• Butler - monkeys responded by pressing door to see the room for 9 hours straight
• Jones - humans more likely to press unpredictable lights
  People will work just to be interested in something - interesting sensory input works as a reinforcer

Question 137

What is the premack principle? (1965, 1971)

Answer 137

Preferred activities can act as reinforcers for less preferred activities
Preference measured by likelihood to engage in particular behaviour
Homme et al - Children would sit quietly on carpet if they get opportunity to kick the bin after

Question 138

What are secondary (conditioned) reinforcers?

Answer 138

Acquire reinforcing properties through experience
Paired with primary reinforcers
Need to avoid extinction

Question 139

What does a delay of reinforcement lead to?

Answer 139

• Delayed reinforcement - less association and less repetition of behaviour
  Rat does not know what behaviour led to food - cannot associate lever pressing with food because they showed many different behaviours in 70s

Question 140

Why is delay of reinforcement less of a problem in humans?

Answer 140

e.g. assignment grades
- Humans have language which bridges time - can rationalise what behaviours led to reinforcer

Question 141

How does delay of reinforcement reduce incentive? (Rachlin and Green, 1972)

Answer 141

R1 : 2s access to food immediately
R2 : 4s access to food after 4s
Time between trials constant so responses to R2 would lead to twice as much food
Despite this the pigeons pecked key 1 on 95% of trials

It’s still important to ensure reinforcement is delivered quickly, because delay reduces incentive

Question 142

What did Roll, Reilly and Johanson (2000) find out about rewards of not smoking?

Answer 142

Smokers offered $1 for foregoing a puff every 5 minutes
Half told money given at end of session, others in 3 weeks
Delay caused 20x more smoking
Rewards of not smoking are too far in the future for people to conceive of the value

Question 143

What is secondary reinforcement in the token economy?

Answer 143

If children behave in class the token (conditioned reinforcer) can be delivered immediately
Can be exchanged for a wide range of primary reinforcers, so different children can be reinforced differently

Question 144

How was the token economy applied to mine workers?

Answer 144

Fox, Hopkins, and Anger (1987)
Reduction of injuries in mine workers using token economy
12-year period, injuries fell by 68% and 85%
Cost of injuries per year $260k
Cost of tokens $12k
Unions insisted on writing tokens into contracts

Question 145

What is reasoning?

Answer 145

The ability to combine two or more pieces of information to draw a novel conclusion

Question 146

What is deductive reasoning?

Answer 146

Deductive reasoning is said to occur when the conclusion is necessitated by the premises. For instance if the statements ‘All ice is cold’ and ‘This is ice’ are true, then we can conclude that ‘This is cold’.

Question 147

What is inductive reasoning?

Answer 147

Inductive reasoning is when the conclusion is likely from the premises. The conclusion can be drawn from the presented facts, but is not necessarily true – the conclusion follows with some degree of probability. So if ‘this ice is cold’ then we can reason by induction that ‘all ice is cold’

Question 148

How do we distinguish animal reasoning from trial and error?

Answer 148

We can look at the ability of animals to solve problems

Question 149

What is dead reckoning/ path integration? What animal uses this?

Answer 149

Navigating by taking account of one’s own body movements
The desert ant, Cataglyphis, has the problem of returning home as quickly as possible, after finding food, to avoid the heat of the Sahara. Wehner & Srinivasan (1981) showed that the ant uses dead reckoning to achieve efficient navigation, rather than use landmarks or follow a scent trail along its outward path. They allowed ants to find food a fixed distance and direction from their nests. When the ants were at the food location the experimenters moved them 600m away. The ants searched for their nests as if they had not been displaced at all. To do this the animals would have to have recorded their own body movements with respect to some external directional information, and also to register the distance they had travelled, so they could compute how far it was back to their nests. We now know that the ants gain their directional sense from the position of the sun in the sky.

Wehner and colleagues later showed, by manipulating the ants’ leg length, that they have a kind of internal pedometer for recording the distance they have travelled:
- Doubled size of ants legs - doubled size of legs and they ran double the distance
- Navigation due to own body movements
Longer travel by path reckoning = more errors

Question 150

What did Cartwright and Collett (1983) find out about piloting with a single landmark in gerbils?

Answer 150

Collett and his colleagues trained gerbils to find food a fixed distance and direction from a landmark. The landmark and goal moved from trial to trial, and the gerbils were released from different points of the arena, so they were unable to locate the food by path integration (dead reckoning). Even so, when the food was removed for a test trial, the gerbils still searched in the correct location with respect to the landmark. This ability to plot a course to a hidden goal using landmarks is known as piloting. Piloting can also take place with multiple landmarks.

Question 151

Can animals create a cognitive map?

Answer 151

If animals possess a cognitive map then they should firstly be able to select a novel route, or shortcut, to a goal, and secondly make a detour around an obstacle that blocks a previously taken path.

Tolman et al could not find conclusive evidence of this - only took a novel route when light signalled goal

Morris (1981) trained rats to locate a hidden platform in a circular pool of water. They were always trained to find the platform in the same location, and always released from the same point on the edge of the pool.
The experimental group were released from a new point on the edge of the pool. To navigate efficiently the rats would have to select a novel route to the goal. Compared with a control group which was released from the same place as during training, they did appear to find the platform quickly. The results of another group, for which the platform was put in a new location during the test, showed that the rats weren’t able to detect or sense the platform in the water without learning its location. However, nearly all the rats in the experimental group began their path to the goal by heading in the wrong direction. It is possible that the rats only altered their course once they had explored the pool for a time, and crossed a path they had previously taken during training.

Taken together, Morris’s and Tolman’s experiments do not provide good evidence for the existence of cognitive maps in rats.

Question 152

How did Pearce et al (2004) find evidence for cognitive maps in animals?

Answer 152

Reward always in top right corner of rectangle
Now reward was in novel shape
Animals still searched in the appropriate corner with the long and short edges equivalent to what they were in the rectangle

Question 153

What is evidence for inductive reasoning or insight in animals? What was a problem with this?

Answer 153

Wolfgang Köhler was an early objector to Thorndike’s assertion that animals learned through trial and error. He showed that chimpanzees were able to use poles and boxes to get closer to fruit hung out of the chimps’ reach. He said this behaviour was evidence of insight, that the novel behaviour came as a result of a flash of inspiration after they had reasoned out the problem internally.

One problem with Köhler’s conclusion is that the chimps were not naïve to interacting with boxes and poles. Perhaps they had had experience of using these items to solve other problems at some earlier time. Later experiments in the 1950s showed that chimps without prior experience of boxes and poles were unable to reproduce Köhler’s chimps’ behaviour

Question 154

How does prior experience influence novel behaviour? Epstein et al (1984) (Pigeons pushing box)

Answer 154

Conducted an experiment with pigeons. Some were trained to push a box towards a spot on the edge of an arena to gain a food reward. They were then trained to stand on a box that was placed underneath a plastic banana and peck at the banana to get food. In the test trial, the box was moved so it was not underneath the banana. Birds that had prior experience of pushing the box around were quicker to move the box underneath the banana, so they could stand on it, than birds that had no experience of moving the box. The fact that the birds produced a novel behaviour without appearing to learn through trial and error could be seen as evidence of insight. However, without prior experience the birds were not able to complete the task efficiently, so it seems experience might be key to explaining apparently insightful behaviour.

Question 155

How is insightful behaviour (tool use) shown in the New Caledonian crow?

Answer 155

In the laboratory, one bird, Betty, was given a straight wire to use to retrieve a bucket containing food from the bottom of a cylinder. After some experience of the wire she spontaneously bent it to make a hook that she used to lift the bucket. The fact that she had experience of the wire, and was wild-caught, might be important to her production of a novel behaviour, but it is impressive, nevertheless.

Question 156

What is analogical reasoning?

Answer 156

A subset of inductive reasoning is reasoning by analogy. For example, in the question ‘Cat is to kitten as cow is to….?’ the answer, by analogy with the cat-kitten exemplar, might be calf. This is on condition that the cat-kitten relationship is thought to be an example of a mother-baby relationship. It could equally be an example of a big-small relationship, so the answer could plausibly be rabbit.

Question 157

Can animals do analogical reasoning?

Answer 157

If animals can be shown to understand relationships of this sort then it’s possible they have the capability for abstract or symbolic thought, which is a key trait in human intelligence.

Gillan and Premack and their colleagues (1981) trained a chimpanzee, Sarah, to use language by pointing to symbols on a board. She learned that one symbol meant ‘same as’, and was given a symbolic analogical reasoning task. The example was two symbols that were identical except for their size. She was then presented with a large triangle with a spot in it, and asked what the correct choice was between a small triangle with a spot in it, and a large triangle with no spot. She understood, by analogy with the example relationship, that the correct answer (‘same as’) was the smaller of the two triangles. It is possible that the experimenters had inadvertently cued Sarah to give the correct answer, since she had never been presented with an analogical reasoning task before, but if the results were to be replicated then this experiment perhaps provides evidence of the most remarkable problem solving skills we have yet seen in an animal.

Also chose other equivalents like tin and tin opener

Question 158

What is communication?

Answer 158

Communication occurs when one organism transmits a signal to another organism that is capable of responding appropriately to that signal

Question 159

What did Von Frisch find out about how honeybees transmit information about the location of food they’ve discovered? (Round dance and waggle dance)

Answer 159

The foraging bee returns to the hive and recruits other workers to search for food in the same location using one of two dances.

Round dance - food source is less that 100m from the hive - encourages random search by the recruited bees
Waggle dance - food is more than 100m from the hive:
The bee runs in a straight line waggling its abdomen rapidly, then turns 360o to the left so it ends where it started. It then makes the straight run again but this time turns to the right. Altogether this dance forms a figure of eight pattern.
The dance tells the workers both the distance and direction of the food from the hive: Distance is revealed by the length of the straight run. Since the rate of waggling is constant, the distance of the food from the hive is also proportional to the number of waggles, and how long it takes to complete the whole figure or eight pattern.

Researchers watch the dance then ran after recruited bees to see how far they went

Question 160

How is distance signalled by bees other than the waggle dance?

Answer 160

The dance is performed on the vertical surface of the honeycomb and the direction of the straight run has a fixed angle with respect to vertical. The angle subtended between vertical and the direction of the straight run is the same as the angle between the sun’s position in the sky and the food source.

Question 161

How do vervet monkeys communicate?

Answer 161

Seyfarth and Cheney (1993)
3 different alarm calls in response to different predators:
When a monkey sees a snake its call causes the others in its troop to look around on the ground; when a leopard is spotted all the members of the troop run to the trees in response to the alarm call; and when an eagle is detected, the alarm call causes the others to look up to the sky. Knowledge of what the calls mean is not innate – the calls are learned in childhood.

Question 162

Who believes that language is innate to humans? (Macphail and Chomsky)

Answer 162

Chomsky - asserted that because all language conforms to rules of grammar, humans must have a language acquisition device in their minds, that will not be found in animals

Macphail - argued that there is no evidence for differences in the intelligence of different species, other than between humans and all other animals. This difference is due entirely to our ability to use language. It follows from this argument that if animals can acquire language it blurs the distinction between human and animal intelligence.

Question 163

What are Hockett’s criteria for language?

Answer 163

Discrete units
Arbitrary units
Semanticity
Displacement
Productivity through syntax

Question 164

Do vervet monkey alarms calls fit with Hockett’s criteria?

Answer 164

Composed of discrete units
Are arbitrary in that the calls have no direct (unlearned) relationship with what they signal
They have semanticity - each call has a specific meaning
Does not have displacement or productivity through syntax

Question 165

How do honey bees show displacement?

Answer 165

Language allows us to refer to events that are displaced in space or time; the honey-bee dance allows the signaller to communicate information about food that is not present in the hive

Question 166

Do animals show productivity through syntax?

Answer 166

Language is structured through rules of grammar, or syntax. Words can have many different meanings when put together in different orders. It is syntax that makes language flexible and varied, but no natural animal communication is structured by rules of grammar as far as we know.

Question 167

What did Furness (1916) and Hayes & Hayes (1951) find out about trying to teach apes to speak?

Answer 167

Furness and Hayes & Hayes attempted to train an orangutan and a chimp (Vicki), respectively, to speak, but these studies had very limited success, partly due to the physical limitations of apes’ ability to produce speech.

Question 168

What did Gardner & Gardner (1969) find out when teaching Washoe, a chimpanzee, to use ASL?

Answer 168

By the time she was five years old, after four years of training, she was able to produce 132 words, including verbs, nouns and pronouns. She could string these words into sentences like ‘you tickle me’ and ‘open key food’, an instruction to open the fridge.
One day, while out with her trainer, Washoe saw a swan on a lake, a bird she had never seen before. The trainer asked, ‘What’s that?’, and Washoe replied, ‘Waterbird’. It is possible that this was a demonstration of Washoe using syntax to create a new word.
Later in her life, Wahsoe adopted a chimp called Loulis. Loulis learned 22 words from interactions with Washoe, and there is some evidence that Washoe actively trained Loulis to form signs with his hands.

Question 169

How did David Premack (1971) teach language to Sarah the chimpanzee?

Answer 169

David Premack and his colleagues trained Sarah, another chimpanzee, to use symbols on cards that each meant a different word. Sarah learned 130 words including nouns, adjectives and verbs, and had to place the cards in the correct order (syntax) to be rewarded.

Question 170

What could Kanzi the bonobo do?

Answer 170

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues trained a number of apes including Lana, a common chimp, and Kanzi, a bonobo to press symbols on a board, called a lexigram, to create sentences.

Question 171

How do apes fulfill Hockett’s criteria for language?

Answer 171

In one interaction Premack, using card symbols, asked Sarah what colour chocolate was. In reply, Sarah chose the symbol for brown.
This demonstrated Sarah’s use, not only of discrete and arbitrary units (the symbols), but of semanticity and displacement – she knew the meaning of the symbols and the chocolate was not present.
Many of the researchers who have trained apes to use symbols believe they fulfil all of Hockett’s criteria for language, including productivity through syntax.

Question 172

What were Terrace’s criticisms of claims that apes could learn productivity through syntax?

Answer 172

Concluded that simpler mechanisms could account for many instances of apparent productivity through syntax.
Washoe - simple sentences like ‘you tickle me’ that require syntax for the correct meaning, could have been learned through trial and error.
The instance where she signed ‘Waterbird’ could simply be a demonstration of her signing the two things she could see – the lake and the bird.

Question 173

What did Terrace train Nim Chimpsky to do? What were his conclusions about ape language?

Answer 173

Terrace trained a chimp, Nim, to sign ASL, and recorded over 19000 multiword utterances, of 5235 types over an 18-month period.
Despite this number and variety, Terrace concluded that there was no grammatical structure to what Nim said. He found that position habits could make certain sentences look grammatically correct:
Nim was in the habit of signing the word ‘more’ before the noun in a sentence
Nim also copied sentences from his trainer, and then altered one or two words, so the new sentence had the correct syntax
Most importantly, Nim did not elaborate in his sentences - in children who are learning to speak the mean length of utterances increases with age. This was not the case with Nim. However, despite Terrace’s conclusions there’s no doubt that, although difficult to show, some apes, like Sarah, are able to produce grammatically correct sentences.

Question 174

Which animals has language comprehension been shown in?

Answer 174

Alex, the parrot (Pepperberg), Kanzi, the bonobo, and various dolphins in Louis Herman’s lab have been shown to comprehend the grammatical rules of instructions.

Question 175

Is production of language of equal importance to language comprehension?

Answer 175

Yes
Overall, evidence that animals can acquire and reproduce grammatically correct language is limited