Exam 1

Question 1

What is the goal of animal cognition research?

Answer 1

compare the abilities of different species and determine whether they are similar or different (complexity of animal behavior)

Question 2

Quantitative vs Qualitative

Answer 2

quantitative: countable or measurable (ex: number based)

qualitative: interpretation based, descriptive (ex: language based)

Question 3

How do we define things like intelligence and cognition?

Answer 3

we can’t really

many different definitions and it varies between species and individuals -> any mental process

Question 4

Issues with anthropocentrism in animal cognition

Answer 4

biased view of animal cog: human abilities are used as the standard for measuring animal intelligence

Question 5

Darwins ideas on mental evolution

Answer 5

• mental processes, emotions, and psychology were subject to evolution
• difference between humans and animals minds are relative

Question 6

Morgan’s Canon

Answer 6

• explaining animal’s behavior in the most basic form
• objective approach

Question 7

Romanes

Answer 7

• coined term mental evolution
• ladder of intelligence

Question 8

Clever Hans

Answer 8

• responded to subtle questions from trainer for correct answer
• highlights importance of considering experimenter bias in animal cog studies

Question 9

umwelt

Answer 9

unique perceptual world experienced by an organism based on its sensory capabilities and ecological niche

Question 10

What are the common features of all senses?

Answer 10

fundamental principles:
- stimulus detection
- transduction
- transmission
- perception
- adaptation
- modality-specific processing
- and feedback control

Question 11

what is a go/no-go task?

Answer 11

behavioral paradigm used to assess an animals ability to detect and respond to a specific stimulus

• animal trained to perform a task in response to a “go” stimulus while withholding the response to a “no-go” stimulus

Question 12

How can go/no-go tasks assess and discover the limits of what species can sense?

Answer 12

by varying the difficulty -> can determine limits of an animals sensory perception

Question 13

How can single cell recording determine what animals sense?

Answer 13

observing neural responses of specific sensory neurons to different stimuli

Question 14

What does vision detect?

Answer 14

• The perception of electromagnetic radiation (Travels in waves)
• Photoreceptors in our eyes detect wavelengths

Question 15

Where does color vision come from?

Answer 15

cones in our eyes receive light and detect color

Question 16

True color

Answer 16

• Species-specific photopigments determine what is perceived as true color
• The anatomy of the eye can create many different perceptions of color

ex: dogs only have 2 types of cones while humans have 3 and peacock shrimp have 12

Question 17

What determines difference in vison?

Answer 17

complex interplay of anatomical, physiological, and ecological factors, resulting in a diversity of visual adaptations optimized for specific ecological niches and survival strategies

Question 18

Depth perception

Answer 18

Animals perceive depth in two ways:
- Binocular vision
- Monocular vision

seeing one object from both fields gives 3D information

Question 19

How are edges perceived?

Answer 19

differential activation of photoreceptor cells in response to contrasting light and dark regions, allowing animals to detect boundaries and shapes in their environment

Question 20

Pheromones

Answer 20

• chemical signals released by animals to communicate with others of the same species
• Mammals can respond to pheromones through changes in behavior or physiological processes

Question 21

How do animals locate the source of a particular sound?

Answer 21

ears will pick up a specific sound at slightly different times with each ear and the brain makes automatic calculations using the difference in time to calculate the location of the sound

Question 22

What do weakly electric fish use their sense of electricity for?

Answer 22

detect muscle activation and heart rate -> know when they are nearby and or predators

Question 23

What might lead to differences in taste perception?

Answer 23

• diff species need to taste/eat diff things

ex: sweetness tells us there are a lot of carbohydrates in the food. Some animals don’t usually eat carbs like cats so their perception of carbs is shallow compared to other animals

Question 24

Concepts

Answer 24

our general idea or understanding of an object

Question 25

How do animals categorize objects using concepts?

Answer 25

use physical features/functions of stimuli to group them based on concepts - require info that is available to our senses

Question 26

how are concepts adaptive?

Answer 26

- allow us to transfer what we have learned previously to new objects - learned

Question 27

How is the go/no-go task used to teach concepts? Why is this flawed?

Answer 27

Given a specific stimulus and when they do the matching reaction they get rewarded flaw: just reacting to stim not conceptualizing why or what's going on

Question 28

How did Bhatt teach pigeons to categorize pictures?

Answer 28

- started with an initial discrimination training phase - once they understood this they were presented with similar images to test if they could generalize the pictures

Question 29

How does pavlovian/classical and operant conditioning allow animals to understand cause and effect?

Answer 29

learn the relationship between events as they are trained that one event precedes another

Question 30

What are the procedures used to train and test the development of relational concepts?

Answer 30

1) Match to sample 2) same/different tasks

Question 31

transfer test rules

Answer 31

1) use novel stimuli 2) perform equivalent to baseline 3) must be 1st experience with

Question 32

generally, what species can form pavlovian associations?

Answer 32

mammals, birds, some fish, and inverts

Question 33

3 term contingency

Answer 33

antecedent, behavior, and consequence

Question 34

classical conditioning experiment example

Answer 34

pavlov's dogs

Question 35

operant conditioning experiment example

Answer 35

thorndike's puzzle box

Question 36

What do animals learn about their environment from classical conditioning?

Answer 36

one event signals/proceeds another (sequence matters)

Question 37

what do animals learn about their environment from operant conditioning?

Answer 37

their behavior causes events in the environment

Question 38

How are operant and classical conditioning affected by biological predispositions?

Answer 38

natural predispositions constrain their capacity for conditioning

Question 39

tool use

Answer 39

intentional manipulation of objects to achieve a specific goal or solve a problem

Question 40

reasoning

Answer 40

Adapting behavior or thoughts to achieve something

Question 41

folk physics

Answer 41

the untrained perception of basic physical phenomena

Question 42

How to test animals for object permanence?

Answer 42

displacement tests: - visible - invisible

Question 43

what are trap tests designed to assess?

Answer 43

insight

Question 44

How are new Caledonian crows and chimps special in their tool use?

Answer 44

demonstrate flexible tool use: - fashioning tools - selecting tools

Question 45

transitive inference

Answer 45

extracting relational rules that have not been explicitly defined

Question 46

liner ordering

Answer 46

learn a linear sequence

Question 47

difference between monkeys and pigeons when learning linear ordering

Answer 47

pigeons took a very long time while monkeys learned a lot faster theory: - monkeys could represent mentally the entire sequence and think about which to press next using this representation - pigeons may have been using associative rules

Question 48

how are dolphins trained to demonstrate creativity?

Answer 48

trained via positive reinforcement to perform a new behavior they had not done that session on command

Question 49

How might the behavior of Kohler’s chimpanzees and Epstein’s pigeons be related to insight?

Answer 49

- suggests that animals can exhibit insightful behavior when faced with novel problems or challenges - animals demonstrated the ability to understand the problem and devise creative solutions to achieve their goals

Question 50

What does the Epstein pigeon study tell us about potentially insightful behavior?

Answer 50

clearly understanding an animal’s prior history tells us how animals might solve problems or behave in ways that seem insightful