Animal cognition
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Animal cognition is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology and behavioral ecology. Much of what used to be considered under the title of animal intelligence is now thought of under this heading.
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Historical background
For most of the twentieth century, the dominant approach to animal psychology was to use experiments on intelligence in animals to uncover simple processes (such as classical conditioning and operant conditioning) that might then account for the apparently more complex intellectual abilities of human beings. This reductionist philosophy was combined with a strongly behaviorist methodology, in which overt behavior was taken as the only valid data for the study of psychology, and in its more extreme forms (the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner and his experimental analysis of behavior) behavior was taken as the only topic of interest. In effect, the mental processes that we experience in ourselves were viewed as epiphenomena.
The success of cognitive psychology in addressing human mental processes, from the late 1950s on, led to a re-evaluation of the research paradigm, and researchers began to address animal mental processes from the opposite direction, by taking what is known about human mental processes and looking for evidence of comparable processes in other species. In a sense this was a return to the approach of Darwin's protegé George Romanes, arguably the first comparative psychologist of the modern era. However, whereas Romanes relied heavily on anecdote and an anthropomorphic projection of human capacities onto other species, modern researchers in animal cognition are in most cases firmly behaviorist in methodology, even though they differ sharply from the behaviourist philosophy. There are some exceptions to the rule of behaviourist methodology, such as John Lilly and, some would argue, Donald Griffin, who have been prepared to take a strong position that other animals do have minds and that we should approach the study of their cognition accordingly. However their claims have not found wide acceptance in the scientific community, though they have attracted an enthusiastic following among lay people.
The development of animal cognition was also strongly influenced by:
- increased use of and interest in primates (and also cetaceans) rather than the rats and pigeons that had become the classic species of the comparative psychology laboratory, and by developments within primatology;
- advancing knowledge of animals' behaviour in their natural environments through studies in ethology, sociobiology and behavioral ecology; such studies often showed that animals needed certain cognitive abilities in order to adapt to their ecological niche (as for example in studies of caching birds such as Clark's Nutcracker), or appeared to use cognitive abilities under natural conditions (for example in Jane Goodall's studies of chimpanzees);
- one or two high profile projects, in particular Allen and Beatrice Gardner's Washoe project in which a chimpanzee learned at least some elements of American Sign Language.
- advancing understanding of brain function through work in physiological psychology and cognitive neuropsychology
This account of the history of the study of animal cognition is inevitably oversimplified. From Romanes on, there have always been comparative psychologists who have been more or less cognitively inclined: obviously examples are Wolfgang Köhler, famous for his studies of insight in chimpanzees, and Edward C. Tolman, who introduced into psychology, as an explanation of the behaviour of rats in mazes, two ideas that have been immensely influential in human cognitive psychology - the cognitive map and the idea of decision-making in risky choice according to expected value.
Methodology
Research in animal cognition continues to use some of the established research techniques of comparative psychology and the experimental analysis of behavior, such as mazes and Skinner boxes, though it employs them in new varieties (such as the 8-arm maze and water maze that have been used in many studies of spatial memory) and in new ways. However it complements those with observation of animals in their natural environments, or quasi-natural environments and also with field experiments. It has also been characterised by a number of very long term projects, such as the Washoe project and other ape-language experiments (e.g. project Nim), Irene Pepperberg's extended series of studies with the African Gray Parrot Alex, and studies of long-term memory in pigeons in which birds were shown to remember pictures for periods of several years. Some researchers have made effective use of a Piagetian methodology, taking tasks which human children are known to master at different stages of development, and investigating which of them can be performed by particular species. Others have been inspired by concerns for animal welfare and the management of domestic species: for example Temple Grandin has harnessed her unique expertise in animal welfare and the ethical treatment of farm livestock to highlight underlying similarites between humans and other animals.
Research questions
Given the broad programme of animal cognition, of looking for the animal analogues of human cognitive processes, the areas of study in animal cognition follow more or less from those in human cognitive psychology. However progress in the different areas has been variable. Among the fields of interest are:
Attention
Research has focused on animals' ability to distribute attention between different aspects of a stimulus, and on visual search. As in humans, it appears that sharing attention between stimulus features reduces the capacity to detect any one of them, though there are some ecologically relevant visual search tasks at which particular species show remarkable abilities (for example, pigeons have an extraordinary capacity to pick out grain from substrate).
Categorisation
Following pioneering research by Richard Herrnstein, there has been a mass of research on birds' ability to discriminate between categories of stimuli, including the kinds of ill-defined category that are used in everyday human speech. Birds have been found to learn this kind of task easily, and to transfer correct responding readily to new instances of the categories.
Memory
The categories that have been developed to analyse human memory (short term memory, long term memory, working memory) have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory (e.g. the serial position effect) have been detected in animals particularly monkeys. However most progress has been made in the analysis of spatial memory, partly in relation to studies of the physiological basis of spatial memory and the role of the hippocampus, and partly in relation to scatter-hoarding animals such as Clark's Nutcracker, certain jays, and certain squirrels, whose ecological niches require them to remember to locations of thousands of caches, often following radical changes in the environment.
Tool use
There are some species that use particular tools as an essential part of their foraging behaviour, for example the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands. However these behaviours are often quite inflexible and cannot be applied effectively in new situations. Several species have now been shown to be capable of more flexible tool use. A well known example is Jane Goodall's observation of chimpanzees "fishing" for termites in their natural environment, and captive great apes are often observed to use tools effectively; several species of corvids have also been trained to use tools in controlled experiments.
Reasoning and problem solving
Closely related to tool use is the study of reasoning and problem solving. Many of the data on these issues come from earlier comparative psychologists such as Wolfgang Köhler, rather than recent experiments. It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving a range of problems that are argued to involve abstract reasoning; modern research has tended to show that the performances of Köhler's chimpanzees, who could achieve spontaneous solutions to problems without training, were by no means unique to that species, and that apparently similar behaviour can be found in animals usually thought of as much less intelligent, if appropriate training is given.
Language
In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behaviour to some non-primate species, including cetaceans, the parrot Alex, and Great Spotted Woodpeckers.
Consciousness
The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds. The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Gordon Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behaviour towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for some other great apes, and some cetaceans, but not for monkeys. However both the interpretation of such data, and the data themselves, remain controversial.
Deception, empathy, and theory of mind
Related to the issue of self-consciousness is the question of whether an animal can show empathy, i.e. can understand what another animal is thinking. It is usually argued that to show empathy requires you to have a theory of mind, i.e. to attribute mental processes to other individuals, and that without a theory of mind it is impossible for an animal or person to show tactical deception. Experiments to test for theory of mind in animals have mainly been carried out on primates. No convincing evidence has been found for theory of mind in any primate species other than the great apes; the interpretation of the data from great apes is currently controversial, but some researchers are convinced that they do show theory of mind.
Continuing controversy
The broad programme of research into animal cognition has achieved a good deal. Nonetheless, its results and philosophy continue to be debated, on a number of grounds:
- Particular issues within animal cognition, particularly the interpretation of language-learning and self-awareness experiments, have generated major controversies both about the extent of the animals' achievements, and about the correct interpretation of the behaviour observed.
- Many non-experts in the field, and a small minority of experts, find the scientific approach too cautious, and feel that it tends to underrate the intellectual achievements of animals by insisting on behavioural evidence. Studies that demonstrate limited intellectual ability in popular species such as dogs, horses, or dolphins are particularly likely to come under this kind of attack.
- Cognitive psychologists interested in work with humans frequently discount studies of animal cognition. To some extent this may be an effect of history - in the 1950s and 1960s cognitive psychology had to struggle to assert itself against the dominance of behaviorism and animal learning, and the attitudes of those days remain entrenched in influential figures in the field.
- Cognitive scientists have been interested in comparing and contrasting human cognition with artificial intelligence or machine cognition, but have been less interested in including animal cognition in the analysis - despite the fact that the common biological origins of human and animal cognition suggest that there might be greater resemblance, at least in some respects, between human and animal cognition than between human and machine cognition. There is also a minority of cognitive scientists who simply neglect accumulated psychological knowledge about cognition, whether animal or human.
- Those psychologists who are committed to radical behaviourism and the experimental analysis of behaviour discount cognitive analyses of animal behaviour. This is not surprising since for the most part they also reject cognitive analyses of human behaviour, and it is perhaps a category error: in so far as the study of animal cognition exposes new behavioural phenomena, it simply provides more that a radical behaviourist must explain without using mentalistic language.
External links
- Avian Visual Cognition, a cyber book edited by Robert G. Cook (http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/avc/)
References
- Wynne, C. D. L. (2001). Animal Cognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave
- Sebeok (1990). Essays in Zoosemiotics. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle. ISSN 08385858.