Week 12 Flashcards
Primates
Reliance on vision rather than smell – loss of wet, naked nose and whiskers of other mammals and reduced relative size of olfactory brain – colour vision – stereoscopic 3D vision Encephalized – large brain relative to body size Five separate digits and fingernails Mainly omnivorous
Humans as hominoids
Darwin: we are descended from African apes?
Today there is little doubt he was correct
– Chimpanzees share 99.4% of tested protein
coding DNA base pairs (Wildman, et al., 2003)
– We are more closely related to chimpanzees than
chimpanzees are to gorillas
But we are not descended from chimpanzees
– We merely share a common ancestor
Darwin’s Problem
Physical evolution
– Continuity of anatomy, nervous and vascular systems
Evolution of mind
– Continuity of mental capacities?
– Darwin’s prediction:
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more
important researches. Psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each
mental power and capacity by gradation.”
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
Progress?
Continuing controversies about gradation
– What precisely are the mental powers of other primates?
– What precisely are uniquely human traits?
Two biases in the literature
– Emphasizing discontinuity
• to justify personal/religious beliefs about humanity’s special status
• to justify human treatment of animals
– Emphasizing continuity
• to show that Darwin was right and humans are part of nature
• to show that the animal one is working with has a capacity
Difficulties with identifying absence of a mental trait
– Absence of evidence versus evidence of absence
Importance of making progress: Comparative analysis can
inform us about
– The evolution of the human mind
– The genetic and neurological basis of higher cognitive capacities
Animal consciousness
To feel
– If same neuronal equipment to detect damage and
shows same behaviour as humans, then likely
feels pain much like us (e.g., Bateson, 1991)
– Experimental evidence
• Rats typically prefer sugar water over water containing
analgesic, but rats with chronologically inflamed joints
prefer water containing analgesic
– Animals with different neuronal systems?
To think?
– Animal intelligence
Intelligence in animals
George Romanes – Comparative psychology – The argument by analogy & anecdote The principle of Parsimony – Lloyd Morgan’s canon – The Clever Hans phenomenon
Intelligent apes?
‘insight’ (Köhler, 1917)
Insightful problem solving
Picking appropriate length tools even
when problem is out of sight (e.g. Mulcahy et al.)
Ape tool use in the wild
Tool production in one place to use at another – Chimpanzees: e.g., ant fishing, water sponge, toilet paper, hammer & anvil (Boesch, 1994) - Also Gorillas and Orangutans
The Machiavellian hypothesis of
the evolution of intelligence
Social intelligence as the prime mover The association between neocortex ratio and group size
Primate social intelligence
Group living Grooming Social hierarchies Keeping track of third party relations Tactical deception
Cooperation
Working together
Social learning:
Imitation & imitation recognition
apes imitating there trainers
Social inheritance
Chimpanzee culture?
Communication
Language
– Max Mueller (1860s and 70s)
• No other communication system is open-ended like
human language
– The simian tongue
• Richard Garner (1890)
– Playback studies with Edison’s Phonograph
– Animal language as fiction
» e.g. Lofting (1920): Dr Doolittle
– Re-discovery of the playback approach in the
1980s
• Marler et al: Vervet monkey alarm calls
– leopard, eagle, python, cat, baboon, human
– deception?
– No evidence of non-human syntactical
languages (next week…)
Self-Awareness
When animals realised who they are eg. seeing themselves in the mirror
Mirror Self-Recognition:
the surprise-mark test
Mark test by Gallup (1970) Children typically pass the test by around 18 months Unsuccessful performance by many animals In primates: success only in chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans (i.e., great apes) – What about gibbons (lesser apes)?
Gibbon self-recognition?
MSR tests with 17 gibbons – 7 siamangs, 3 common gibbons, 7 crested gibbons – Adelaide Zoo, Perth Zoo, Gorge Wildlife Park and the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington Mirror exposure: 5-6 hours Motivation check: – Feed icing – Surreptitiously mark limb with icing Mirror self-recognition test NO gibbons showed any mark-directed behaviour – Post-tests • Marks ON versus IN mirror Evidence of absence and not just absence of evidence
Pretence
Pretence involves primary representation
of reality and secondary representation of
pretend world
Home-reared great apes play with dolls &
treat them ‘as if’ animate
Various recorded anecdotes
Secondary representation in
human infants
In the middle of the second year infants show:
– pretence
– insightful problem solving
– mirror self-recognition
– imitation games
The great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans
and gorillas) are the only primates to have
provided evidence for these capacities, too
(Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001)
Phylogenetic
Reconstruction
Analogy vs Homology
Evolutionary Parsimony
Secondary representation
evolved in great ape ancestor?
Surveying the gap
though complex emotion reason language mental time travel conscience self-awareness creativity imagination theory of mind motive beyond drive meta-thinking other
Uniquely human cognitive capacities
If interested… – Take PSYC3262 – And read: • Suddendorf, (2013). The GAP – The science of what separates us from other animals. New York: Basic Books.
Filling the gap: The Hominins
ancestry and evolution
Gradually filling the huge gap
between animal and human minds
The gap appears so large because all other hominins have died out (or have been displaced by Homo sapiens) And we are currently increasing the gap by exterminating the great apes…
Summary Comparative &
Evolutionary Cognition
– Topics • history • tool use & causal reasoning • machiavellian intelligence • language • self-recognition • phylogenetic reconstruction • evolutionary psychology – Learning objectives • historical approaches to comparative cognition • describe the Clever Hans phenomenon • the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis • the results of research on MSR • the argument by homology
