Comparative Cognition Flashcards
What are the origins and development of the field of comparative cognition?
- Evolutionary theory (Darwin, Wallace et al): humans share certain cognitive abilities with other species.
- Cognitive science and cognitive psychology: concepts and models potentially applicable to this study (representation, information processing, modelling).
- Philosophy of mind: framework to organise human cognitive architecture.
Who are the original comparative thinkers?
C Darwin and A R Wallace
Two Darwinian/Wallace concepts:
Adaptation
Natural selection
Original idea – that there is continuity between animal species and the human species: Darwin (1871)
Romanes (1881): Animal Intelligence: Studies in human psychology used introspection as the ‘empirical’ method
What is Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?
Haeckel (1866) proposed that an organism, during its development, goes through the stages of those forms of life from which it has evolved.
Species that share the same branch of the evolutionary tree go through the same early stages of individual development, and diverge after.
Organisms start with a common general embryonic form and then diverge into distinct adult morphologies as they complete their development.
What rejects ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?
Modern biology now rejects this dogmatic perspective. Biologists cannot spot in our development any stages that correspond precisely to those of a fish or a reptile, even though human beings evolved from fish and reptiles.
List the studies on animal intelligence in developmental science
Tinkelpaugh (1928, 1932): delayed reactions
in monkeys – the lettuce/banana
experiments.
Uller (2020)
Explain Tinkelpaugh (1928, 1932) experiment.
Tinkelpaugh was interested in the capacity of nonhuman primates to represent hidden objects in delayed response tasks where he could measure memory.
Three rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and one cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) were tested individually.
Tinkelpaugh showed the monkey a piece of lettuce and placed it underneath one of the cups behind the screen.
Tinkelpaugh then changed the procedure slightly. He showed the monkey a banana and placed it underneath the cup behind the screen. However, surreptitiously, he changed the banana for a piece of lettuce.
What is ethology?
Ethology is the scientific study of behavioural mechanisms as they occur in natural conditions.
Ethologists are concerned with the causes, development and survival value of naturally occurring behaviours.
K Lorenz, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, showed that there are innate mechanisms in animals that guide their behaviours.
K Lonrenz, N Tinbergen and K von Frisch, the fathers of ethology, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1973.
What’s a releaser in ethological terms?
A stimulus from one animal to another causes a particular response.
There is a specific stimulus responsible for triggering a particular behavioural pattern.
A mechanism bridges the stimulus to the behaviour.
Releasing stimuli are simple configurations which serve as minimally sufficient to elicit complex sequences of behaviour in conspecifics, e.g., red dot on beak of adult gull will engage
feeding behaviour.
What is Tinbergen’s (1963) 4 levels of
analysis framework?
Identifying the four questions we ask in
animal behaviour:
How does the behaviour emerge across the lifespan
(development)?
How does it work (mechanism)?
How and why did it evolve (evolution)?
and
Why is it adaptive (function)?
What is insight?
The capacity to gain accurate and deep understanding of a problem.
It is often associated with movement beyond existing
paradigms.
It is the idea that an understanding of cause and effect within a particular context has been reached.
That is – there is a state of an environment, or situation, and there is an EUREKA or AH HA moment that will change this state.
Define instinct.
An innate propensity in organized being, varying with
the species, and manifesting itself in acts which
appear to be rational; are performed without
conscious design; or intentional adaptation of means
to ends.
Hypothesis that there is “faculty” involved in this
operation (formerly often regarded as a kind of
“intuitive knowledge”).
Explain Ditz and Nieder (2015) experiment.
Neurons selective to the number of visual items in the
corvid songbird endbrain
“When a crow looks at three dots, grains or hunters,
single neurons recognize the groups’ ‘threeness’. This
discovery shows that the ability to deal with abstract
numerical concepts can be traced back to individual
nerve cells in corvids.”
