What animals know Flashcards
peanut task
An orangutan that is looking at a tube with a peanut in it, but the peanut is too deep into the tube for her to reach it
→ the orangutan spits water into the tube to make the peanut rise/float up close enough to the opening of the tube to reach it
Demonstrates problem-solving skills and cognitive abilities to come up with solutions to new problems
Do monkeys have a sense of fairness? experiment
2 monkeys give a rock to a human, but one monkey gets a cucumber in exchange and the other gets a grape in exchange
The monkey that gets a cucumber gets upset → demonstrates that monkeys DO have a sense of fairness
Why study animal minds? (2 main reasons)
To understand animals
To understand ourselves
Why study animal minds: to understand animals subcategories?
Curiosity: animals are cool! How clever are they?
Ethnics: do animals have consciousness or morals status
Psychology and behavioral biology: which cognitive mechanisms support complex behavior like alliance building or navigation
Evolution: how does cognition evolve
Conservation: how does cognition influence adaptability
Why study animal minds: to better understand ourselves (humans) subcategories?
Psychology and anthropology: what makes humans unique?
Human evolution: how did our psychology evolve?
Psychology and philosophy: how does the mind represent the world about it? What is the role of language and culture in human cognition? (do humans need language to have cognitive thoughts)
The cognitive approach (new view of intelligence)
the challenge is not in determining whether or not a species or individual is smart, but rather to understand their cognitive profile
old view of intelligence?
one is more or less clever than another
Old view tried to compare animals based on intelligence but realized that many factors play into making an animal more intelligent (social learning, memory, navigation, inhibitory control etc.)
Experimental psychology
uses scientific methods to study behavior and mental processes
All behavior can potentially be explained by multiple psychological mechanisms
Just because the behavior of two species or even people look identical , does NOT mean that the behaviors are controlled by the same psychological or cognitive mechanism
Observations: generate hypothesis
Experiments: test hypotheses and controlling for alternatives
clever hans?
a horse that was trained by a math teacher to do basic arithmetic (ie. 2+2 → the horse will tap its foot 4 times in response)
A lot of interest in how exceptional this horse’s cognitive abilities were
Tested in the presence of trainer vs in the absence of trainer: with the absence of trainer, the horse was horrible at math
The horse was picking up different cues/tensions from the trainer or audience to ‘know” when to stop tapping (the trainer was unconsciously cuing the horse)
Significance: thinking that we are testing the horse’s math skills but actually the horse is just picking up specific cues → need to extremely careful at controlling things in experiments studying the animal mind
Anthropomorphism
the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities (ie. animals, objects, or even abstract concepts)
–> People often anthropomorphize animals: giving them human personalities in stories or believing they have human-like cognitive abilities when animals don’t necessarily have them
Morgan’s Canon
suggests that we should avoid attributing complex human-like mental states to animals unless necessary
Default interpretation should be that the lower intelligence/simpler mechanism is what is actually happening with the animal (should NOT assume a higher mechanism)
Capuchins (monkey) tube experiment
Showed that their learnt skill was not based on any real understanding of the situation, as when the tube was inverted they persisted in their old strategy
ecological validity
testing animals on tasks that mimic the problem they naturally face in the wild, problems their cognition evolved to solve (the solution to the fact that often times many animals will fail experiments)
Give an example of animals deceiving each other?
The mother grooms her son and then when the son returns the favor, she grabs the son’s stone tools for herself → shows perspective, planning, deception OR it was all just a coincidence of timing (entirely unplanned and nothing super interested is happening)
Highlights the challenge of studying animal minds: there are often multiple reasonings for why an observed behavior happened and whether it is significant or not
give 2 examples of animal cognitive feats
- Caching (hiding): clark’s nutcracker hide nuts and then recover them from 6,000 locations after 6 months
→ directly related to the survival of these animal species → Clark’s nutcrackers have extraordinary memory/storage that is even more pronounced in humans - Large semantic memory capacity: Border collie can remember hundreds of label and verbal commands (human language)
- In one experiment: Chaser (a dog) used DEDUCTION to pick out a toy that she has never seen or heard the label of out of a large group of toys that she already knew the labels of (hundreds and thousands of labels)
