Animal Cog Midterm 2 Notes PDF

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A study guide for midterm 2 of animal cognition....

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What is the responsibility of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)? 1. Review and approve all proposed animal research involving live vertebrate animals (including field studies) 2. What two publicized events had a major impact on the creation of the Animal Welfare Act? 1. Concentration camp for dogs Life magazine article 1. Skeletal dogs 2. Neglectful conditions discovered at a Maryland dog dealer’s farm 2. Pepper, sports illustrated 1. Disappearance of family Dalmatian 2. Traced to Bronx hospital – died in experimental surgery 3. What three things are researchers supposed to minimize in their animal subjects? 1. Distress, discomfort, pain

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How did Dr. Shumaker define "tool use" in animals? 1. The portability of the external object or inanimate object 2. The connection of the tool to the “goal” or the “separate object” 3. Can tools be made inside the animal’s body? (web and poop) 4. Beck (1975; 1980, 10) proceeded to define tool use as "the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself, when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orienta tion of the tool 5. to use B. Preston's (1998, 513) evocative phrase, our current definition has four distinct elements: 1. 1. a tool user externally employs an unattached or manipulable attached environmental object 2. 2. to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself (with "to alter" implying purposiveness) 3. 3. when the user holds or directly manipulates the tool during or prior to use and 4. 4. when the user is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool

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Which group of animals have revealed the greatest number of examples of tool use, at least so far? 1. primates

What is episodic memory? 1. Being able to recall specific events 2. What, where, when 7. What are the key components of episodic memory that Prof. Crystal and others have tried to demonstrate in rats and other animals?

1. Item, place, context 2. Sequential order in which events are presented 3. Trial-by-trial records of information 4. Elements of configural learning 8. What is the basic method by which Prof. Crystal tests for different types of memory? 1. Radial arm maze and the rats have to remember which arm had a particular reward 2. Rats have to choose the least recent smell too 3. What-where-when 1. Chocolate arms replenished after an interval and chow arms didn’t 1. Rats learned to revisit choc arms after the delay at a higher rate 2. Chocolate replenishment depended on the time of day 3. Time phase shift – rats went off of the time of day not their circadian rhythms 9. What contraption is used, and what, at the most basic level, do the rats have to remember? 1. ^^^ 10. Why did Prof. Crystal need to control for familiarity judgments in his experiments testing for episodic memory? 1. To rule out any other way the rats could have solved the maze other than episodic memory 11. What is the relevance of rat memory abilities apparently being dependent on their hippocampus? 1. They can test drugs for alzheimer’s on them 2. Implies they have episodic memory and that they can test on it

12. What is working memory? 1. Holding info in your mind to remember – small capacity 2. Temporarily stores info for short-term use 13. What is memory for serial order? 1. Memory of the order of past events 1. Forms foundation of all causal reasoning 2. In the frontal lobe 14. What is the relationship between memory for serial order and understanding causal relationships? 1. ^^^ 15. How does memory of objects in different locations differ between males and females, on average, in humans? 1. Females are a little bit better - .31 SD advantage of females 16. What is the evidence of sex differences in memory of objects in different locations in rats? How was it tested? 1. Females study objects longer when they appear in new positions

17. What is Allen's proposed criteria for deciding if an animal has a concept? 1. O systematically discriminates some Xs from some non-Xs 2. O is capable of detecting some of its own discrimination errors betwees Xs and non-Xs 3. O is capable of learning to better discriminate Xs from non-Xs as a consequence of its capacity 4. For these capacities to be implemented it appears that there must be an internal standard of comparison that represents the organism's world independently of its perceptual representation at any given moment. Thus, such evidence supports the claim that organisms with these capacities possess representations of the world that are detached from immediate perceptual information.”

18. What is 'meta-cognition'? 1. Knowing what an animal knows 2. Knowing about your knowledge or an animal’s knowledge 1. I’m not confident that I know the capital of whatever 19. How has meta-cognition been tested in animals? 1. The gambling thing – they can opt out if they don’t think they know it 2. Lecture 17 slides 18-21 3. Simple delayed-match-to-sample 1. Subject shown an item 2. Delay 3. Shown 2 more items (1 mateches in step 1) 4. Subject selects item that matches item in step 1 4. Modified 1. Same 3 steps 2. Subject given 2 choices 1. Continue for big reward (if they correctly match to the sample) 2. Stop with small (but guaranteed) reward 5. They opt out more when they are less likely to answer correctly 6. Betting on answers 1. Subject is given a task 2. Subject enters a response, but is not immediately shown whether it was correct or not 3. Subject is allowed to chose one of 2 options 1. High risk: large reward if the subject had correctly answered, but an equally large loss if they had incorrectly answered 2. Low risk: small, guaranteed reward regardless of whether they had answered correctly or incorrectly 4. Monkeys bet correctly for what they knew 20. What are some human-language-like features of monkey alarm calls? 1. Arbitrary connection btw signal and referent 2. Development sequence for “eagle” alarm calls 1. No calls 2. Calls for anything in sky 3. Only calls for birds

4. Only large birds 5. Only for eagles that eat monkeys 21. What behavior of Chaser (the dog that is claimed to know the names of 1000 different objects), illustrated in the video shown in class, suggests he can do basic logical processing as well? 1. He picked a toy that was new and he didn’t know the name of out of a line up. He knew all the other’s names, so the new name must belong to the unfamiliar toy 22. What types of concepts did Alex the Parrot seem to understand? 1. Labels for 50 objects 2. Labels for concept categories 1. 7 colors 2. 5 shapes 3. Quantities from 0 to 6 4. Bigger/smaller 5. Same/different 3. Combine labels to identify, request, refuse, categorize and quantify 4. Meanings of phrases “come here” “I want X” and “wanna go Y” 23. What kind of performance by Alex the Parrot suggests he hasn't just memorized answers (without really understanding them) to a bunch of questions about objects? 1. He’s able to answer questions about a set of objects – different questions 2. Harder to imagine that she’s trained him on all these different possibilities to just answer 2 or whatever

24. What was the basic study design Drs. Toth and Schick used to test Kanzi’s stone tool making abilities? 1. The box which had fruit in it. Gave Kanzi stones to hit together to make flakes 25. What were the findings of Drs. Toth and Schick after testing Kanzi? 1. He found his own methods of flaking the stone – throwing on the hard floor 2. Has not shown modification of flakes to resharpen them 3. He likes larger, heavier pieces for cutting 4. He has a good sense of the potential usefulness of flakes – visually inspects flakes for sharpness 5. Has improved his skills over 3 years 26. Why did they want to investigate whether a bonobo could make stone tools? 1. Comparison to early humans – more related to our evolution 2. Showing how apes do it is more suggestive of how our common ancestor could have done it

27. What types of communication are used by wild apes? Are these behaviors voluntary or involuntary?

1. Facial gestures 2. Body language 3. Vocalization 4. Involuntary – controlled by limbic 28. What are the 9 features of language Prof. Hunt discussed? 1. Discreteness: meaning conveyed by sound, not loudness, length 2. Arbitrariness: we could change “b” to “ch” in every word 3. Duality of patterning: sounds make words, words make sentences 4. Displacement: refers to things not present 5. Productivity: novel expressions 6. Innateness: acquisition without training 7. Reference to abstractions 8. Natural and flexible use 9. Rules that constitute a grammar 29. How did ape language comprehension research demonstrate apes’ ability to use these 9 features? 1. Spoken language impossible 1. Hayes and chimp Viki – can only say 4 words – have different vocal tract and tounge 2. Gardner taught Washoe sign, also koko 3. Premack’s sarah – plastic tokens 4. Chimps don’t have innateness 1. Loulis learned sign from washoe w/o training 5. Nim Chimpsky and Herb Terrace 1. 125 words by 4 years, stings of words 2. No grammar or turn-taking 6. By 1970s 1. 8/9 features – no grammar 2. Washoe passed tests according to Gardner but failed according to critics 7. Kanzi – Savage-Rumbaugh 1. Lexigrams – learned from mom 2. 3,000 words but understands 500 3. Understands spoken language 4. Does displacement and word order 30. What type of communication systems have researchers tried to teach apes? 1. Sign 2. Actual speaking 3. Plastic tokens 4. Lexigram 31. What is the relevance of the subject Genie in language research, as discussed by Prof. Hunt? 1. What a human could do if they were not exposed to language ever – to see the innate abilities of a human if they didn’t grow up with it 2. 1 ½ yr old: confined and almost no human interaction Rescued at 13 ½ yrs Attempts to teach her language Vocabulary progress good Pronunciation poor Grammar poor, e.g.

word order Struggled with Articles Plurals Past tense As a 15 yr old, level of 2 yr old Never language-competent

32. What is a "double-blind" test of language comprehension, and how was it done by the Gardners for testing the chimpanzee Washoe? 1. Chimp sees slide 2. Human who can’t see slide records signs 3. Show ape an object on a slide – the ape signs to a human and they record it 1. Errors due to sloppiness – not opening hand enough, calling a brush a comb 33. Why caused ape language researchers to switch to trying to teach non-vocal language systems to apes? 1. Vicki – they can’t vocalize like humans, so spoken language isn’t a possibility 34. According to Prof. Hunt, do animals have language? 1. I thought he said we can choose to define language to exclude animals but that might be unhelpful. Did he come down with a strong conclusion on this front? 2. Correct, he said it depends on how you define language. You can define it to include apes since they possess the basic features of language, or you can define it to exclude them because they can’t use language to the full extent like humans do. 1. We can define language to exclude apes – >1000 words – Articles – >5 word sentences – Wild use – Past, future tenses – Recursion (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street,” rather than “the man is walking down the street; the man is wearing a top hat.”)

3. Hockett definition – they have the basic features but they are very limited 1. Includes apes 4. Do apes have language? 1. 5-20% of human vocab 2. Sentence: 25% 3. Symbols of mental images 4. Natural use 5. Learn from other apes 6. Grammar primitive 7. Overgeneralize 8. Articles are beyond them 9. Past, future tense is beyond their language...