Animal intelligence; experimental studies

Abstract

THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR i ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 20 'Imitation/ 'invention' and 'practice' almost inevitably refer to behavior observed from the outside. 1 Perception,' ' attention,' ' memory,' ' abstraction,' 'reasoning' and 'will' are samples of the many terms which illustrate both ways of studying human and animal minds. That an animal perceives an object, say, the sun, may mean either that his mental stream includes an awareness of that object distinguished from the rest of the visual field; or that he reacts to that object as a unit. 'Attention ' may mean a clearness, f ocalness, of the mental state ; or an exclusiveness and devotion of the total behavior. It may, that is, be illustrated by the sharpness of objects illumined by a shaft of light, or by the behavior of a cat toward the bird it stalks. 'Memory' may be consciousness of certain objects, events or facts; or may be the permanence of certain tendencies in either thought or action. 'To recognize' may be to feel a certain familiarity and surety of being able to progress to certain judgments about the thing recognized ; or may be to respond to it in certain accustomed and appropriate ways. 'Abstraction ' may refer to ideas of qualities apart from any consciousness of their concrete accompaniments, and to the power of having such ideas ; or to responses to qualities irrespective of their concrete accompaniments, and to the power of making such responses. 'Reasoning' may be said to be present when certain sorts of consciousness, or when certain sorts of behavior, are present. An account of 'the will' is an account of consciousness as related to action or an account of the actions themselves. i Not only in psychological judgments and psychological terms, but also in the work of individual psychologists, this twofold content is seen. Amongst writers in this country, for example, Titchener has busied himself almost '' the sum total of human experience considered as dependent upon the experiencing person," to the self as conscious, or to a connection-system known to many observers and born and bred in the animal's body. Reason in Common Sense, p. 154 ff. CHAPTER II ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE; AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE ASSOCIATIVE PROCESSES IN ANIMALS 1 THIS monograph is an attempt at an explanation of the nature of the process of association in the animal mind. Inasmuch as there have been no extended researches of a character similar to the present one either in subject-matter or experimental method, it is necessary to explain briefly its standpoint. Our knowledge of the mental life of animals equals in the main our knowledge of their sense-powers, of their instincts or reactions performed without experience, and of their reactions which are built up by experience. Confining our attention to the latter, we find it the opinion of the better observers and analysts that these reactions can all be explained by the ordinary associative processes without aid from abstract, conceptual, inferential thinking. These associative processes then, as...

Why be nice? Psychological constraints on the evolution of cooperation

“…This strategy is loosely based on Thorndike's law of effect [39], in that when an individual receives rewarding payoffs (T or R), it will repeat that choice, but if it receives punishing payoffs (P or S), it will switch choices (see Box 2). Nowak and Sigmund conducted evolutionary simulations of an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and showed that Pavlov could emerge and remain stable in a stochastic environment [38].…”

Dopamine responses comply with basic assumptions of formal learning theory

“…Classic theories assume that predictive learning occurs whenever a stimulus is paired with a reward or punishment 1,2 . However, more recent analyses of associative learning argue that simple temporal contiguity between a stimulus and a reinforcer is not suf®cient for learning and that a discrepancy between the reinforcer that is predicted by a stimulus and the actual reinforcer is also required 3±6 .…”

Cognitive agents — a procedural perspective relying on the predictability of Object-Action-Complexes (OACs)

“…An agent who has realized that through such a process entities of the world can be made predictable might also have the chance to discover that it is also possible to operate with predictable outcome on other objects out in the world and that chains of predictable outcomes can be actively generated (Mendes et al, 2007), even possible transforming and shaping the object to a certain ends (Hunt, 1996;Weir et al, 2002). The discovery of the Law of Cause and Effect (Thorndike, 1911) during evolution of humankind, which appears to be a cornerstone of complex cognition 12 , could, thus, well have been bootstrapped by the horizon enlargement of an agent via temporary bodily integration of parts of the world. But, which attributes are important?…”

“…When performing a certain OAC many things can change: Filling a cup leads to a full, heavier cup, an emptier, lighter coffee pot a splashing noise and possibly a change of the illumination (because someone else has switched a light on). Normally, through repetition the agent can find out which properties change causally (Thorndike, 1911), hence in way correlated to the OAC (certainly not the illumination), and this way the agent can improve the Expected Change reaching smaller values of σ ΔO with more and more trials 13 . Here we note that we have tacitly assumed that the agent will be able to perform "fairly optimal" actions.…”