20.Cognitive Abilities in Animals PDF

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Lecture 20: Cognitive Abilities in Animals:Cognitive Abilities in Animals: Cognition the mental processes concerned with the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge including perception and thinking. How animals represent and process things about the world around them. Mental States: Mental states...

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Lecture 20: Cognitive Abilities in Animals: Cognitive Abilities in Animals: - Cognition the mental processes concerned with the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge including perception and thinking. - How animals represent and process things about the world around them.

Mental States: - Mental states themselves are inaccessible but can look at responses animals give to external objects and events. - Work by Cheney and Seyfarth. Use of playback experiments to address questions about animal communication and animal minds. Playback =

Referential Signalling: Involves using signals to functionally denote external objects and events. -

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E.g. Vervet monkey alarm calls denote predator type. -

Leopard alarm -> bark.

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Eagle alarm -> cough.

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Snake alarm -> chutter.

If played back to monkeys or given naturally => elicit categorically different responses relevant to the predators hunting style. -

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Ex: if they heard the bark (leopard), they would run to the tree and bark down

Vervet monkey alarm calls denote predators in a referential way but simpler alarm calling systems are also common. -

Response urgency signalling in Californian ground squirrels.

Whistle for high urgency predation threat, chitter-chat call for low urgency. -

Some animals have alarm calling systems that contain both referential and response urgency information -

E.g. meerkats have diff sounds to explain what predator it is and how urgent it is to get help.

Calls can also refer to the social environment: -

Specific grunts in vervet monkeys (Cheney and Seyfarth).

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Monkeys who saw specific grunts based on the level of treat they were facing AND what

Rhesus macaque screams (Gouzoules & Gouzoules) -

Big scream of rhesus monkeys infants if the infant is being beaten up by a non-relative. -

Mothers listen for this

Other evidence that animals can attach acoustic or visual labels to external objects and events: - Kanzi pygmy chimpanzee (bonobo) uses a lexigram keyboard to communicate. - Captive dolphins taught to attach labels to objects (Herman) - Alex, African grey parrot trained by Irene Pepperberg.

Language Like Abilities in Animals: -

Animals can attach acoustic labels to objects and events

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Little evidence for higher order structure (syntax). Nothing equivalent to duality of patterning in humans (where meaningless phonemes are combines into morphemes

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Semantics

and words, words combined into sentences)

Labelling Social Relationships: Mother-offspring relationship) ●

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Abilities to label social relationships are also evident in some species and this is one of the contexts in which labelling may have been selected for. ○

In response to playback of an infant’s scream, group members look towards the infant’s mother. (

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First demonstrated by Cheney and Seyfarth in vervet monkeys.

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Also occurs in macaques and baboons.

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Mother-offspring bond:

Dasser 1988. ○

Two adult female java monkeys (macaca fascicularis) showed slides of other members of their social groups.

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First trained to distinguish between a limited number of mother-offspring and non-mother offspring pairs ■

rewarding them if they picked out mother offspring pairs correctly.

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Then showed slides of additional mother-offspring and non-mother-offspring pairs that hadn’t been involved in the training sessions.

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Subjects had very high success rates despite exemplars including diverse combination of age and sex classes of offspring.

Knowledge of Third Party Relationships: Individual themselves is not involved -

Knowledge of the dominance relationships of other individuals -

could confer fitness benefits, -

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enabling individuals to assess which potential allies are likely to be effective in coalitions against opponents

playback studies suggest baboons know what vocal interactions to expect between dominants and subordinates.

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There is evidence that male bonnet macaques use information about third party relationships -> To recruit allies

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Anderson et al 2017: capuchin monkeys and pet dogs differential reactions to people who are helpful or unhelpful in third-party contexts.

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consistently choosing allies that outrank them and their opponents (Silk 1999) Less friendly to people who have been unpleasant to their owner.

Machiavellian Intelligence: - Provided cunning evidence for social interactions based on mind-reading and deception in his book. - Anecdotal accounts of tactical deception in primates suggested Machiavellian intelligence. - Tactical deception -> short term tactics where elements from an honest counterpart in the individual's repertoire are used in a functionally deceptive act.

Anecdotes of tactical deception described by primatologists: - Concealment. - Distraction. - Creating an image. - Manipulation of targets using social tools. - Deflection of target to a fall guy. - Countering deception. - Concealment and distraction were most commonly reported in primates, the rest were more common in baboons and chimpanzees.

Many of these categories would be connected with the manipulation and monitoring of visual attention. -

Anecdotes aren’t sufficient to demonstrate intentional deception -

i.e. deception that involves manipulation of another individuals mental state

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Example: monkey doesnt need to know the TOM of the other monkey. -

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The female could just learn that she is less liely to get punished if she’s doing things behind a rock.

Large potential functional benefits if a deceptive act performed with understanding of outcome, particularly mental state understanding. -

However, thought bubbles aren't necessary to explain this behaviour, and may be the result of associative learning.

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Key issue is distinguishing understanding another’s behaviour from understanding another’s mind.

Theory of Mind: Ability to attribute mental states (e.g. desires, intentions, knowledge) to others.

Early Experiments: ●

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Hare et al 2000: ○

Early evidence that chimpanzees can attribute a visual perspective to others.

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Chimpanzees appear to: ■

Know what other individuals do and do not see.

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Can recall what a conspecific has and has not seen in the immediate past.

Santos 2006: ○

Rhesus monkeys appear to know what others can / cannot hear.

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When a human competitor looking at them – stole grapes equally from both noisy and silent containers.

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When competitors are looking away – preferentially stolen from a silent container.

Krupenye 2016: great apes pass false-belief tests. ○

False belief understanding is a hallmark of human theory of mind.

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False belief understanding is of particular interest because it requires recognising that others actions are driven not by reality but by beliefs about reality even when those beliefs are false.

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Great apes show understanding of false belief through anticipatory looking.

Crockford 2012. ○

Wild chimpanzees may be aware of knowledge and ignorance in others.

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Chimpanzees are more likely to alarm call (alet hoos) in response to presentation of a snake (viper model) in the presence of unaware group members than aware group members. ■

If the group didnt know, they would scream more, if the group knew, they’d shut the fuck up

Theory of Mind in Corvids : Scrub jays (Dally, emery and clayton, 2005) - Birds preferentially stored food in distant sites when watched by another jay but used near and distant equally when the observer's view is blocked by the screen. - Items that were stored in view of the observer were moved multiple times. - When offered equidistant sites that were either in view or out of view to store food, chose out of view sites when observed but stored equally in both sites when not observed.

Horses -> social emotional understanding Dogs perform better than primates at using human social cues to find hidden food – this ability is present in puppies. - Dogs are also highly sensitive to attentional states in humans. - But whether or not these abilities are the result of associative learning or mental state understanding remains to be seen. - Horses -> cognitively rich representations for social companions and humans (Proops, grounds, smith and Mccomb, 2018) containing information from multiple modalities – mental pictures?

Right vs left hemisphere; -

if they saw a picture of a human looking angry in the morning

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Then saw that person, -

Angry = left eye

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Happy = right eye

Emotional memory + hemispheric bias (left gaze/right gaze)...