Introduction to animal cognition Flashcards
Who was Romanes?
– Darwin’s nominated intellectual heir: advocated mental continuity
– “Animal intelligence”: collection of anecdotes, interpreted mentalistically
– Scala naturae of mental function
What is scala naturae of mental function?
Scale of Nature- this theory of Aristotle’s states that species are arranged in a ladder-like order where the inanimate matter(non-living things) is on the lowest step while the human was on the highest
Who was Lloyd Morgan
– Biologist
– Sceptical of Romanes
– Lloyd Morgan’s Canon
What is Lloyd Morgan’s cannon
Invoke only those mental processes necessary to explain the observed behaviour
• In an experiment, can see an animal do something amazing and you might think that’s something I would’ve done. This is anthropomorphism. Need to use simplest explanations to explain the behaviour.
Who was Thorndike?
– Experimental studies of instrumental learning
– Claimed new complex behaviour arose through blind trial and error alone
– Laws of Exercise (behaviour is strengthened by repetition) and Effect (behaviour is strengthened if “satisfying state of affairs” follows)
– Coined term “reinforcement”
Who was Pavlov?
– Observed “psychic secretions” of saliva in dogs
– Devised theory of cortical excitation and inhibition to account for these conditional reflexes
Who was Watson?
– Reacting against introspectionist accounts of human mental life
– Coined term “behavio[u]rism”
– Assume animals are like simple machines until proved otherwise
– Popularised Pavlovian “conditioning” as an explanation of all learning
• Thought all psychology could be reduced to conditioning
What was Horndike’s instrumental conditioning: the law of effect
The animal can perform a response to the lever press. This lever press will give a pellet. After a few trails, the animal will press the lever when the tone is on to get the pellet. This is happening because of its perception of the stimulus. It has become associated.
Habits are independent from consequences but are formed during reinforcement.
This is an example of a similar experiment but with cats. Horndike placed cats in puzzle boxes and they want to get out. In the box, there is a string or lever and this will let them out. By putting the cat in the box many times, they start getting out faster and faster.
Who was Clark Hull?
- Wanted to codify the laws of conditioning mathematically
- Publications from ca. 1920 to ca. 1950
- Wide range of topics
- Interlocking theories of motivation and learning, through reinforcement
- Best known experimental work on rats learning to run mazes and runways
- in practice all learning explained by reinforcement of S-R bonds through reinforcement by drive reduction
- Theories expressed in mathematical form, under the influence of falsificationist philosophy of science
- Died 1951; theoretical tradition continued by Spence, Mowrer, Amsel, Capaldi.
Who was Edward Tolman?
• Experiments on rats
– in complex mazes or
– choosing between complex objectives
• Introduced key cognitive concepts:
– Cognitive maps (his term)
– what we would now call Decision theory
• Accounted for learning in terms of Stimulus-Stimulus associations
– Good explanatory power
• Concerned with cognitive mechanisms
• Described thought as “internalised running backwards and forwards“
• No well-known successors (though Lashley, Lawrence and others took forward some of his ideas), but known and respected by later animal cognition researchers, e.g. Tony Dickinson, Nick Mackintosh, John Pearce, Geoff Hall.
Who was Kohler
- Gestalt psychologist studying problem solving in apes as an example of perceptual reorganization
- Claimed to observe “insight”: changes in behaviour from trial to trial not explicable in terms of observable trial and error or reinforcement - sudden emergence of solution
- Reducing behavior to very little (e.g. stimulus)
- He studied animals in zoo
- Placed bananas out of reach of chimpanzees
- None can get to it
- One chimpanzee goes away, thinks, walks over and gets banana crates laying around, stacks them up and gets the bananas like that
- But be careful, anecdote. These crates were there for weeks, they played with them. What might have happened may not have been insightful problem solving.
- Comparative studies (chickens, dogs, chimpanzees)
Why was radical behaviourism initially powerful
- Skinner’s powerful polemic, e.g. “Are theories of learning necessary?“
- Replacing apparently irresolvable theoretical arguments with directly observable “control over behaviour“
- Huge range of powerful schedules meant any required behaviour could be produced on demand
- Apparently “cognitive” effects could be synthesised using operant conditioning procedures
- Radical behaviourism offered a simplifying and surprising philosophy
Why did radical behavioursim fail
- Denial of “inside story” simply incorrect.
- Skinner’s attempt to account for language mocked by Chomsky
- Experiments on human operant conditioning showed marked differences from animal results
What is the dual process theory
whereby human mental life is understood in terms of a combination of associative and more cognitive (rule-based) processes
What was Heye’s experiment on the rat
Heyes and colleagues have looked at imitation in the rat. The response used was pushing a hanging joystick either to the left or right. Rats observed a demonstrator rat say pushing the joystick to the demonstrator’s right, then were transferred to the demonstrator chamber and reinforced for pushing in either direction. They preferentially pushed in the same direction as the demonstrator – imitation?
• Had a denibstrater with a joystick, the other is the observer rat.
• The demonstrater is learning that pushing the joystick to one side they get food but not to another.
• Once done, the observer is placed in the demonsntraters side
• Either way it pushes it, it will get food
• The new rat imitates the first and pushes it the same way that he did
• However, this imitation conclusion is wrong
