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Animal mindreading: what's the problem?
Abstract
Research on mindreading in animals has the potential to address fundamental questions about the nature and origins of the human capacity to ascribe mental states, but it is a research programme that seems to be in trouble. Between 1978 and 2000 several groups used a range of methods, some with considerable promise, to ask whether animals can understand a variety of mental states. Since that time, many enthusiasts have become sceptics, empirical methods have become more limited, and it is no longer clear what research on animal mindreading is trying to find. In this article I suggest that the problems are theoretical and methodological: there is difficulty in conceptualising alternatives to 'full-blown' mindreading, and reluctance to use the kinds of empirical methods necessary to distinguish mindreading from other psychological mechanisms. I also suggest ways of tackling the theoretical and methodological problems that draw on recent studies of mindreading in humans, and the resources of experimental psychology more generally. In combination with the use of inanimate control stimuli, species that are unlikely to be capable of mindreading, and the 'goggles method', these approaches could restore both vigour and rigour to research on animal mindreading.
... It is advantageous to many social interactions and it is thought to be, at least in its richest definition, uniquely human [2]. Studying non-human animals, however, can help elucidate the nature and origin of some basic components of this ability [3]. Several studies have attempted to characterize non-human animals', as well as pre-verbal human infants', grasp of others' mental states, in particular of others' visual perspectives ( [2,[4][5][6] for reviews). ...
... Despite some objections [10], experience-projection tests remain the best experimental tool currently available for distinguishing behaviour reading from mind reading [3,18,19]. Indeed, during the experience phase, at the very least, subjects have to learn about a psychological affordance: the barriers are opaque or transparent (i.e. they afford geometrical occlusion) only in relation to a visual system perceiving them from a certain perspective [15]. ...
... In all models, we included condition (the experimenter looked through the opaque or transparent screen) as the only test predictor. Control predictors with fixed effect were the colour of the tunnel containing the transparent screen (blue or yellow), trial number (1)(2)(3)(4), as well as the dogs' age and sex. Finally, we included the random slopes of the condition and trial number within the subject (the correlations between random slopes and intercept were pruned in case of convergence issues). ...
Despite extensive research into the Theory of Mind abilities in non-human animals, it remains controversial whether they can attribute mental states to other individuals or whether they merely predict future behaviour based on previous behavioural cues. In the present study, we tested pet dogs (in total, N = 92) on adaptations of the ‘goggles test’ previously used with human infants and great apes. In both a cooperative and a competitive task, dogs were given direct experience with the properties of novel screens (one opaque, the other transparent) inserted into identical, but differently coloured, tunnels. Dogs learned and remembered the properties of the screens even when, later on, these were no longer directly visible to them. Nevertheless, they were not more likely to follow the experimenter’s gaze to a target object when the experimenter could see it through the transparent screen. Further, they did not prefer to steal a forbidden treat first in a location obstructed from the experimenter’s view by the opaque screen. Therefore, dogs did not show perspective-taking abilities in this study in which the only available cue to infer others’ visual access consisted of the subjects’ own previous experience with novel visual barriers. We conclude that the behaviour of our dogs, unlike that of infants and apes in previous studies, does not show evidence of experience-projection abilities.
... However, other alternative explanations persist. Over the last few decades, the dominant debate in the animal theory of mind literature has concerned whether animals are really reading minds, or just reading behavior (Heyes, 2015;Penn & Povinelli, 2007). The problem stems from the fact that mental states are often inferred based on observed behavioral cues (e.g., an agent's facial orientation is a cue to what she can see). ...
... The strongest test of mind-reading, called the goggles test, was proposed by Heyes (2015Heyes ( , 1998 who was inspired by Novey (1979), and it has since been promoted by a number of scholars (e.g., Penn & Povinelli, 2007;Whiten, 2013). Heyes (1998) noted that an unusually powerful way to exclude behavior-reading explanations would be to engineer a scenario in which behavioral cues are kept constant, and subjects are likely able to solve the task only if they can project onto an agent a novel mental state that they themselves have only just experienced (Heyes, 1998). ...
... Excitingly, in this study, apes responded differentially to the exact same video stimulus depending on whether they had previously experienced the barrier in real life as opaque or see-through. Some researchers have argued that the goggles task can be solved non-mentalisticly if subjects integrate the information they learn about the occlusive properties of the experimental substrate (i.e., that it does or does not obstruct line-of-gaze) with existing behavior rules (rather than by projecting their experience of seeing or not seeing onto the agent) (Henley & Povinelli, 2020;Lurz, 2009;Perner, 2012); others have challenged this deflationary account (e.g., Heyes, 2015). In either case, the goggles task remains the strongest identified nonverbal test of mind-reading currently on the market, and it is one that at least great apes have passed. ...
Researchers have studied non-human primate cognition along different paths, including social cognition, planning and causal knowledge, spatial cognition and memory, and gestural communication, as well as comparative studies with humans. This volume describes how primate cognition is studied in labs, zoos, sanctuaries, and in the field, bringing together researchers examining similar issues in all of these settings and showing how each benefits from the others. Readers will discover how lab-based concepts play out in the real world of free primates. This book tackles pressing issues such as replicability, research ethics, and open science. With contributors from a broad range of comparative, cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, ecological, and ethological perspectives, the volume provides a state-of-the-art review pointing to new avenues for integrative research.
... Animal cognition researchers expend great energy in debating the suitability of specific tasks to test certain cognitive abilities, both formally through commentaries and discussion in papers (e.g., Amodio et al., 2019;Beran, 2015;Farrar, 2020;Heyes, 2017;Vonk, 2018Vonk, , 2019aVonk, , 2019bVonk, , 2019b, but also in the uncounted hours spent peer-reviewing papers, across multiple journals. And less frequently, researchers write articles critiquing the approaches of entire research programmes (e.g., Anderson & Gallup, 2015;Heyes, 2012Heyes, , 2015Leavens et al., 2019;Lind, 2018;Smith et al., 2014), of specific issues within the field (e.g., Andrews & Huss, 2014;Barker & Povinelli, 2019;Beran, 2012;Buckner, 2013;Burghardt et al., 2012), or of the field's approach as a whole (e.g., Allen, 2014;Eaton et al., 2018;Vonk, 2021). ...
... However, one may object to this line of argument and argue that animal cognition research effectively elicits criticism of its methods and findings. Criticism and nuances of operationalisations and task designs are omnipresent in the literature (e.g., Anderson & Gallup, 2015;Heyes, 2015;Lind, 2018;Povinelli, 2020;Povinelli & Vonk, 2004;Redshaw et al., 2017;Suddendorf & Corballis, 2008;Vonk, 2019), and perhaps this strong methodological criticism combats the issues of confirmatory research practices and directional bias. However, when this criticism is, a) primarily methodological, and b) focused on the individual study, the criticism can become ineffective in the long-term, even if it is scientifically valid, because it can promote incremental changes to a flawed process. ...
... Throughout this thesis I have raised concerns about replication, bias and incentives in animal cognition research, as well as our ability to detect and study this. While these issues are sometimes discussed in animal cognition, these debates are often performed by a minority of stakeholders in animal cognition research-often between those who claim discoveries of "higher" processes in animals and their corresponding 'killjoys' or skeptics, accompanied by a meta-commentary from a small number of interested researchers and philosophers (for example Allen, 2014;Anderson & Gallup, 2015;Barrett, 2015;Craig & Abramson, 2018;Despret et al., 2016;Eaton et al., 2018;Farrar & Ostojic, 2019;Heyes, 2015;Leavens et al., 2019;Penn & Povinelli, 2013;Povinelli, 2020). But how effectively these debates are reaching animal cognition researchers in general, and how they are received, has garnered little attention. ...
In this thesis I explore the extent to which researchers of animal cognition should be concerned about the reliability of its scientific results and the presence of theoretical biases across research programmes. To do so I apply and develop arguments borne in human psychology’s “replication crisis” to animal cognition research and assess a range of secondary data analysis methods to detect bias across heterogeneous research programmes. After introducing these topics in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 makes the argument that areas of animal cognition research likely contain many findings that will struggle to replicate in direct replication studies. In Chapter 3, I combine two definitions of replication to outline the relationship between replication and theory testing, generalisability, representative sampling, and between-group comparisons in animal cognition. Chapter 4 then explores deeper issue in animal cognition research, examining how the academic systems that might select for research with low replicability might also select for theoretical bias across the research process. I use this argument to suggest that much of the vociferous methodological criticism in animal cognition research will be ineffective without considering how the academic incentive structure shapes animal cognition research. Chapter 5 then beings my attempt to develop methods to detect bias and critically and quantitatively synthesise evidence in animal cognition research. In Chapter 5, I led a team examining publication bias and the robustness of statistical inference in studies of animal physical cognition. Chapter 6 was a systematic review and a quantitative risk-of-bias assessment of the entire corvid social cognition literature. And in Chapter 7, I led a team assessing how researchers in animal cognition report and interpret non-significant statistical results, as well as the p-value distributions of non-significant results across a manually extracted dataset and an automatically extracted dataset from the animal cognition literature. Chapter 8 then reflects on the difficulties of synthesising evidence and detecting bias in animal cognition research. In Chapter 9, I present survey data of over 200 animal cognition researchers who I questioned on the topics of this thesis. Finally, Chapter 10 summarises the findings of this thesis, and discusses potential next steps for research in animal cognition.
... However, other alternative explanations persist. Over the last few decades, the dominant debate in the animal theory of mind literature has concerned whether animals are really reading minds, or just reading behavior (Heyes, 2015;Penn & Povinelli, 2007). The problem stems from the fact that mental states are often inferred based on observed behavioral cues (e.g., an agent's facial orientation is a cue to what she can see). ...
... The strongest test of mindreading, called the goggles test, was proposed by Heyes (2015Heyes ( , 1998 who was inspired by Novey (1979), and it has since been promoted by a number of scholars (e.g., Penn & Povinelli, 2007;Whiten, 2013). Heyes (1998) noted that an unusually powerful way to exclude behavior-reading explanations would be to engineer a scenario in which behavioral cues are kept constant, and subjects are likely able to solve the task only if they can project onto an agent a novel mental state that they themselves have only just experienced (Heyes, 1998). ...
... Excitingly, in this study, apes responded differentially to the exact same video stimulus depending on whether they had previously experienced the barrier in real life as opaque or see-through. Some researchers have argued that the goggles task can be solved non-mentalisticly if subjects integrate the information they learn about the occlusive properties of the experimental substrate (i.e., that it does or does not obstruct line-of-gaze) with existing behavior rules (rather than by projecting their experience of seeing or not seeing onto the agent) (Henley & Povinelli, 2020;Lurz, 2009;Perner, 2012); others have challenged this deflationary account (e.g., Heyes, 2015). In either case, the goggles task remains the strongest identified nonverbal test of mindreading currently on the market, and it is one that at least great apes have passed. ...
Social life demands complex strategies for coordinating and competing with others. In humans, these strategies are supported by rich cognitive mechanisms, such as theory of mind. Theory of mind (i.e., mental state attribution, mentalizing, or mindreading) is the ability to track the unobservable mental states, like desires and beliefs, that guide others’ actions. Deeply social animals, like most nonhuman primates, would surely benefit from the adept capacity to interpret and predict others’ behavior that theory of mind affords. Yet, after forty years of investigation, the extent to which nonhuman primates represent the minds of others remains a topic of contentious debate. In the present chapter, we review evidence consistent with the possibility that monkeys and apes are capable of inferring others’ goals, perceptions, and beliefs. We then evaluate the quality of that evidence and point to the most prominent alternative explanations to be addressed by future research. Finally, we take a more broadly phylogenetic perspective, to identify evolutionary modifications to social cognition that have emerged throughout primate evolutionary history and to consider the selective pressures that may have driven those modifications. Taken together, this approach sheds light on the complex mechanisms that define the social minds of humans and other primates.
... Drugačija interpretacija empirijskih podataka, a koja također dovodi u pitanje tradicionalno gledište teorije uma, utemeljena je na tvrdnji da izvedba na zadatcima u kojima se mjere neverbalni odgovori nema nikakve veze s teorijom uma (Heyes, 2014b(Heyes, , 2015Ruffman i Perner, 2005). Slično je gledište poznato u području koje se bavi komparativnom kognicijom, gdje se nalazi o teoriji uma kod životinja često odbacuju i interpretiraju kao rezultat nekoga drugoga kognitivnog mehanizma (Heyes, 1998;Penn i Povinelli, 2007). ...
... Stoga njihov prijedlog sadrži specifična ograničenja (engl. signature limits) koja se mogu empirijski testirati (Heyes, 2015). ...
Teorija uma je sposobnost pripisivanja mentalnih stanja drugima. Do prije otprilike 20 godina empirijska istraživanja upućivala su na to da je teorija uma kognitivno zahtjevna sposobnost koja se razvija oko četvrte godine života. Međutim, sve veći broj istraživanja koja koriste zadatke koji ne zahtijevaju verbalne odgovore upućuje na to da sposobnost koja nalikuje na teoriju uma postoji i izvan kognitivne kontrole te da je pokazuju već i djeca stara devet mjeseci. Ovaj pregledni rad predstavit će tri glavna tipa teorija koje pokušavaju objasniti te novije empirijske rezultate i raspraviti o njima. Nadalje, u radu će biti istaknuti empirijski nalazi koji idu u prilog svakoj od tih teorija ili je opovrgavaju. Iako postoje prijedlozi za kritične eksperimente koji bi trebali moći napraviti razliku između teorija, trenutačno ti prijedlozi još nisu dovoljno korisni za te svrhe jer se podatci koji bi se mogli dobiti takvim eksperimentima mogu u različitim teorijama različito interpretirati. Stoga je važno da se budući rad o teoriji uma fokusira na uklanjanje dvosmislenosti u predviđanjima i interpretacijama svake od teorija.
... While, for humans, the main question is when and under what circumstances these "higher" mind-reading processes emerge during development (for reviews, see Baillargeon et al. 2016;Grosse Wiesmann et al. 2017), the corresponding research on non-human animals has been primarily motivated by the question whether such skills exist at all outside the genus Homo (Buckner 2014;Heyes 2015;Lurz 2011). Since the seminal paper by Premack and Woodruff (1978), it is mainly great apes that have been tested in such tasks (for reviews, see Call and Tomasello 2008;Krupenye and Call 2019;Lewis and Krupenye, in press). ...
... The cues of others' visual access can be more or less obvious, being either directly observable or subtle, but always require a certain degree of perspective-taking. Whether this decision requires the subject to represent, in some form, the mental awareness of others remains an open question (Heyes 2015(Heyes , 1998Penn and Povinelli 2007;Povinelli and Vonk 2004). Indeed, in most studies, subjects had to integrate observable features from others' current or past behaviours, and might have based their decisions solely on their own (egocentric) rather than the other's (altercentric) perspective. ...
An important question in the study of canine cognition is how dogs understand humans, given that they show impressive abilities for interacting and communicating with us. In this review, we describe and discuss studies that have investigated dogs’ perspective-taking abilities. There is solid evidence that dogs are not only sensitive to the gaze of others, but also their attention. We specifically address the question whether dogs have the ability to take the perspective of others and thus come to understand what others can or cannot perceive. From the latter, they may then infer what others know and use this representation to anticipate what others do next. Still, dogs might simply rely on directly observable cues and on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what others can perceive. And instead of making inferences from representations of others' mental states, they may have just learned that certain behaviours of ours lead to certain outcomes. However, recent research seems to challenge this low-level explanation. Dogs have solved several perspective-taking tasks instantly and reliably across a large number of variations, including geometrical gaze-following, stealing in the dark, concealing information from others, and Guesser/Knower differentiation. In the latter studies, dogs' choices between two human informants were strongly influenced by cues related to the humans’ visual access to the food, even when the two informants behaved identically. And finally, we review a recent study that found dogs reacting differently to misleading suggestions of human informants that have either a true or false belief about the location of food. We discuss this surprising result in terms of the comprehension of reality-incongruent mental states, which is considered as a hallmark of Theory of Mind acquisition in human development. Especially on the basis of the latter findings, we conclude that pet dogs might be sensitive to what others see, know, intend, and believe. Therefore, this ability seems to have evolved not just in the corvid and primate lineages, but also in dogs.
... Therefore, it is not surprising that some sophisticated terminology of philosophy already reaches its limits when it comes to socio-cognitive abilities of other living agents, such as children or non-human animals (cf. Brownell 2011;Heyes 2014Heyes , 2015Pacherie 2013;Perler 2005;Premack/Woodruff 1978;Vesper et al. 2010;Warneken et al. 2006). In contrast, developmental psychology and animal cognition demonstrate gradual appearances and multiple realizations of socio-cognitive abilities, but these cannot be captured by the aforementioned sophisticated terminology. ...
... There are multiple realizations of socio-cognitive abilities in various types of agents, such as infants and non-human animals (cf. Brownell 2011;Heyes 2014Heyes , 2015Pacherie 2013;Perler 2005;Premack/ Woodruff 1978;Warneken et al. 2006). And different capacities come online at different stages of development (Perner 1991;Tomasello 2008). ...
Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.
... The more deflationary definition of 'theory of mind' is arguably the default -some of its opponents seem to acknowledge it as such (e.g., Heyes 2015). Its opponents' definition, however, is not obviously illegitimate (although it is linked to some possibly intractable methodological problems; see Halina 2015; cf. ...
... The role of 'theory of mind' in such ethically-loaded theorizing lends it normative connotations that different researchers may want 'on their side' (Gallie, 1955). Part of the motivation for putting forward the logical problem and objecting to previous research is that it casts nonhuman animals as inappropriately similar to humans, in the eyes of those who offer the objection (e.g., Caporeal & Heyes 1997;Heyes, 2014Heyes, , 2015Penn et al., 2008;Povinelli, 2004;Povinelli & Vonk, 2003). Compare the example of 'vision'. ...
In recent philosophy of science there has been much discussion of both pluralism, which embraces scientific terms with multiple meanings, and eliminativism, which rejects such terms. Some recent work focuses on the conditions that legitimize pluralism over eliminativism – the conditions under which such terms are acceptable. Often, this is understood as a matter of encouraging effective communication – the danger of these terms is thought to be equivocation, while the advantage is thought to be the fulfilment of ‘bridging roles’ that facilitate communication between different scientists and specialisms. These theories are geared towards regulating communication between scientists qua scientists. However, this overlooks an important class of harmful equivocation that involves miscommunication between scientists and nonscientists, such as the public or policymakers. To make my case, I use the example of theory of mind, also known as ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, and broadly defined as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. I begin by showing that ‘theory of mind’ has multiple meanings, before showing that this has resulted in harmful equivocations of a sort and in a way not accounted for by previous theories of pluralism and eliminativism.
... The second way of bringing forth, we suggest, refers to how our actions transform our environment in order to counter environmental pressures, thereby enhancing our chances of survival in ways that feed back to us and fundamentally change who we are and what we can do. So stated, it is a matter of niche construction (Laland et al., 2000a(Laland et al., , 2016Odling-Smee et al., 2003) which is one of the basis for the extended evolutionary synthesis (Laland et al., 2014, 2015, Pigliucci & Müller, 2010. The extended synthesis is a conceptual framework for thinking of evolution that aims to expand on traditional (or modern) evolutionary synthesis, the orthodoxy in evolutionary biology which combines adaptationism with Mendelian genetics. ...
... Whether or not this is a difference of kind or degree depends on whether other animals have a "theory of mind" like we do, that is, whether they are capable of ascribing intentional states to other animals. Research on the subject of animal cognition has been live yet controversial (seeHeyes, 2015, for a historical overview and a methodological critique). In this argument, we do not rely on whether non-human animals have a theory of mind. ...
Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point.
... A prominent example of such an interpretive dispute concerns the landmark experiment of Hare, Call, & Tomasello (2000) on Theory of Mind in chimpanzees, which has by now been locked in interpretive stalemate for two decades (Heyes 2015;Lurz 2011). In this experiment (Fig. 2), a subordinate and a dominant chimpanzee sit across a shared enclosure from one another, held in their respective rooms by guillotine doors which can be raised and lowered by the experimenters. ...
... Specifically, they cache more quickly, are less likely to return to previous caches, and have even been observed to make "false caches"-poking their beaks in the ground while retaining the food in their throat pouch (Bugnyar 2013). However, in all prior designs the ravens could see the competitor's gaze cues at test, and so this body of research had until recently faced the same interpretive stalemate as the research on chimpanzees (Heyes 2015). ...
In this essay, I provide a forward-looking naturalized theory of mental content designed to accommodate predictive processing approaches to the mind, which are growing in popularity in philosophy and cognitive science. The view is introduced by relating it to one of the most popular backward-looking teleosemantic theories of mental content, Fred Dretske’s informational teleosemantics. It is argued that such backward-looking views (which locate the grounds of mental content in the agent’s evolutionary or learning history) face a persistent tension between ascribing determinate contents and allowing for the possibility of misrepresentation. A way to address this tension is proposed by grounding content attributions in the agent’s own ability to detect when it has represented the world incorrectly through the assessment of prediction errors—which in turn allows the organism to more successfully represent those contents in the future. This opens up space for misrepresentation, but that space is constrained by the forward-directed epistemic capacities that the agent uses to evaluate and shape its own representational strategies. The payoff of the theory is illustrated by showing how it can be applied to interpretive disagreements over content ascriptions amongst scientists in comparative psychology and ethology. This theory thus provides a framework in which to make content attributions to representations posited by an exciting new family of predictive approaches to cognition, and in so doing addresses persistent tensions with the previous generation of naturalized theories of content.
... Monkeys and apes are also sensitive to others' goals and intentions, further components of a causal understanding of behavior (Call et al. 2004, Phillips et al. 2009). Debate continues as to how rich and human-like theories of mind are in nonverbal animals (Heyes 2015, Penn & Povinelli 2007. In particular, the ability of nonhuman primates to represent full, belief-like propositional states, as opposed to distinguishing between knowledge and ignorance, remains contested (Phillips et al. 2021). ...
Primates have evolved diverse cognitive capabilities to navigate their complex social world. To understand how the brain implements critical social cognitive abilities, we describe functional specialization in the domains of face processing, social interaction understanding, and mental state attribution. Systems for face processing are specialized from the level of single cells to populations of neurons within brain regions to hierarchically organized networks that extract and represent abstract social information. Such functional specialization is not confined to the sensorimotor periphery but appears to be a pervasive theme of primate brain organization all the way to the apex regions of cortical hierarchies. Circuits processing social information are juxtaposed with parallel systems involved in processing nonsocial information, suggesting common computations applied to different domains. The emerging picture of the neural basis of social cognition is a set of distinct but interacting subnetworks involved in component processes such as face perception and social reasoning, traversing large parts of the primate brain.
... This cognitive bias does not necessarily have to be related to sociality, and perhaps the abstraction linking the test results to the SIH is rather tenuous at best. Overall there is continued debate over the evidence for theory of mind in birds, with some studies producing results difficult explain through simple associative learning (Bugnyar, Reber, & Buckner, 2016), whilst others are critical of interpretations that suggest evidence of theory of mind (Heyes, 2015). A more robust test of the SIH might be to look at cognitive abilities with a more obviously social use. ...
Navigating the physical world may present only a small fraction of the challenges faced by social animals. Sociality brings with it numerous benefits, including access to important information that may have otherwise been harder to come by. However, almost every aspect of these apparent benefits may also entail additional cognitive challenges, including how to interpret signals from conspecifics, who to attend to, and how to incorporate knowledge about signallers when deciding how to respond. One approach to understanding the cognitive abilities associated with social function is to investigate social species that take part in potentially costly group behaviours, where individual decisions must be made in a social context. In this thesis I explore how jackdaws (Corvus monedula), a highly sociable corvid species, use acoustic information to coordinate collective anti-predator responses. In Chapter Two I showed using playback experiments that the magnitude of collective responses to anti-predator recruitment calls known as “scolding” calls depends on the identity of the caller, with larger responses to familiar colony members than unfamiliar individuals. In Chapter Three I then used habituation-dishabituation experiments to show that this vocal discrimination operates at the level of the individual, with jackdaws discriminating between the calls of different conspecifics, regardless of their level of familiarity. In Chapter Four, I examined whether aspects of call structure conveyed information about threat levels. Here, I found that high rates of scolding calls were associated with elevated threats, and playback experiments suggested that this information might result in larger group responses. The finding that jackdaws are capable of mediating their response to alarm calls based on the identity of the individual caller, and on structural variation in call production, raised the question of whether jackdaws employed similar forms discrimination between acoustic cues made by predators in their environment. I investigated this in Chapter Five, using playback experiments to show that jackdaws responded not only to the vocalisations of resident predators, but that this ability extended to novel predators, and that responsiveness was mediated by the phase of the breeding season in which predators were heard. Together, these findings provide insights in to how discrimination among acoustic cues can mediate group behaviour in species that respond collectively to threats.
... The ability to make such information-seeking and uncertainty monitoring responses is unlikely to allow for devising and using metacognitive strategies as may increase information use in this task, e.g. the aforementioned memory aids such as mnemonic devices or inner speech. Furthermore, the representational nature of this uncertainty is unknown (Beran et al., 2012;Carruthers, 2008Carruthers, , 2009) and (considering findings regarding animal mindreading, Call & Tomasello, 2008;Heyes, 2015) it seems unlikely that nonhumans explicitly represent "I know" (or a non-linguistic equivalent of such a belief) as humans do. This would be expected to limit their ability to make appropriately selective responses in more subtle situations (e.g. that presented in this study) in which partial information is available from multiple sources. ...
Population size has been proposed to promote cumulative culture in humans. Experimental evidence from adult humans suggests that one explanatory mechanism might involve combining beneficial information from multiple models. However, it is possible that such combinatory social learning requires cognitive capacities restricted to adult humans. In our task, children aged 5–10 were exposed to two models who consecutively searched a 3×3 array for rewards. Models revealed different correct and incorrect reward locations. This information could be used by the child to maximise their own score on the same task. We were interested in children's ability to select rewarded locations, and avoid unrewarded ones, revealed by both models. We also manipulated the spatial and temporal displacement of the information available. Results showed that the youngest children were unable to fully benefit from the additional information provided by the two models under spatial and/or temporal displacement. Such displacement likely applies in most real-world cases of cumulative culture therefore our result may offer insight into the constraints on cumulative culture in nonhumans.
... Of course, it is possible to deny that humans are the paradigmatic cognitive systems, and that there are paradigmatic cognitive systems (e.g., Figdor 2018). However, there may be methodological justifications for treating humans as the paradigm case, for example, a special interest in explaining human capacities (e.g., Heyes 2014Heyes , 2015Wundt 1907). Even conceding that humans are the paradigm cognitive systems and that they have a special place in the goals of cognitive science does not guarantee an anthropocentric approach. ...
Among those living systems, which are cognizers? Among the behaviours of, and causes of behaviour in, living systems, which are cognitive? Such questions sit at the heart of a sophisticated, ongoing debate, of which the recent papers by Corcoran, Pezzulo, and Hohwy (2020) and Sims and Kiverstein (2021) serve as excellent examples. I argue that despite their virtues, both papers suffer from flawed conceptions of the point of the debate. This leaves their proposals ill-motivated — good answers to the wrong question. Additionally, their proposals are unfit to serve the legitimate roles for characterizations of cognition.
... There are also-lower level explanations like those formulated in terms of 'submentalizing' abilities (which according to Heyes should have more place in the research program on animals ;Heyes 2014;2015), or tracking abilities couched in quasi-mentalist terms (Butterfill and Apperly 2013). My view is that these hypotheses are not currently in a position to debunk the higher-level hypothesis. ...
In this essay, I deal with the problem of the attribution of psychological predicates to non-human animals. The first section illustrates three research topics where it has become scientifically legitimate to explain the conduct of non-human animals by means of the attribution of psychological predicates (mind-reading in apes, episodic memory in rats, and the feeling of regret in rats and mice). The second section discusses several philosophical objections to the legitimacy of such attributions provided by central thinkers from the last decades (like Malcolm, Stich, Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, and Brandom). I try to show that these objections —which are related among other questions to the holism of the mental, the indeterminacy of the attributions, and the strangeness of animal concepts— can be alleviated. In the third section, I propose to adopt a literalist view of the attributions in the sense articulated by Figdor (2018). At the same time, I argue that one must draw limits to the conceptual change forwarded by her literalist view, taking into account holistic considerations and the fact that the psychological concepts must retain their core notes.
... These sub-mentalizing abilities are probably shared with many non-human animals and may be what gaze-tracking experiments actually measure. As a result, Heyes (2015a) However, Heyes has argued that infants' receptivity to pedagogical cues is supported by broadly applicable genetic adaptations that are not specifically 'for' ...
Link to ePrint: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138335
While culture is common in the animal kingdom, cumulative culture appears to be limited to humans. Research suggests that this is due to (1) our advanced social cognition, in particular joint attention and Theory of Mind; and (2) our reliance on high-fidelity mechanisms of social learning such as teaching. However, some have argued that these mechanisms are themselves culturally transmitted, vary across cultures, and that contact with Western norms and institutions reshapes cognition in small-scale societies. These proposals require us to test whether developmental trajectories observed in industrialized populations translate to other societies. To this end, I examine the development of Theory of Mind and teaching among children living in rural areas of Vanuatu. In Chapter 2, I combine results from participant observations and informal interviews to explore the ethnographic context. I examine kinship systems, childrearing practices, and worldviews, and discuss how they relate to folk models of the mind and cultural transmission. In Chapter 3, I examine the development of Theory of Mind and mental state talk. Consistent with the idea that Theory of Mind is culturally learnt, the results diverge from Western findings. However, they also contradict earlier studies and point to methodological challenges, urging more caution in the interpretation of cross-cultural work. In Chapter 4, I examine the development of teaching. The results diverge from Western findings, with children’s teaching reflecting local norms and perceptions of cultural transmission. This suggests that while teaching as such is developmentally reliable, specific teaching styles, along with the way we conceptualize teaching, may be culturally learnt. In Chapter 5, I explore various socio-economic and demographic trends associated with ‘modernization’, such as market integration, formal education, overseas travel, and household structure, documenting considerable heterogeneity. However, I failed to find support for the idea that transformations associated with ‘Westernization’ shift children’s cognitive development.
... While the exact mechanisms remain debated (see, e.g. [14][15][16], these results and others (see reviews in 17,18 ) demonstrate that non-human primates share one of the fundamental hallmarks of our human ToM reasoning: the ability to represent what others see and know. ...
Much of human experience is informed by our ability to attribute mental states to others, a capacity known as theory of mind. While evidence for theory of mind in animals to date has largely been restricted to primates and other large-brained species, the use of ecologically-valid competitive contexts hints that ecological pressures for strategic deception may give rise to components of theory of mind abilities in distantly-related taxonomic groups. In line with this hypothesis, we show that cleaner wrasse ( Labroides dimidiatus ) exhibit theory of mind capacities akin to those observed in primates in the context of their cooperative cleaning mutualism. These results suggest that ecological pressures for strategic deception can drive human-like cognitive abilities even in very distantly related species.
... Additionally, investigating whether and how other species may integrate different social cues can help shift the focus of social cognition studies in animals away from binary questions -for example does species X understand false beliefs? -towards more process-oriented and nuanced research questions, such as: what are the relative contributions of mechanisms A and B to how species X perform behaviour Y? (Buckner, 2013;Heyes, 2015). In doing so, this work may also identify mechanisms of varying complexity that operate in the absence of language and may feed into uniquely human social cognition. ...
Eurasian jays have been reported to protect their caches by responding to cues about either the visual perspective or current desire of an observing conspecific, similarly to other corvids. Here, we used established paradigms to test whether these birds can - like humans - integrate multiple cues about different mental states and perform an optimal response accordingly. Across five experiments, which also include replications of previous work, we found little evidence that our jays adjusted their caching behaviour in line with the visual perspective and current desire of another agent, neither by integrating these social cues nor by responding to only one type of cue independently. These results raise questions about the reliability of the previously reported effects and highlight several key issues affecting reliability in comparative cognition research.
... In contrast, when they observed that the dog used his/her paw to pull the rod for no visible reason, they imitated this inefficient action. However, upon closer examination, dogs' performance in these tasks can be explained by low-level, submentalizing explanations (domain-general cognitive processes that may appear like true mentalizing but turn out not to be upon closer inspection) 45,46 . Dogs seem to have performed the rational action in the first condition only because they were distracted by the presence of a ball and simply missed the presented inefficient action 47 . ...
When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between different categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same? We tested dogs' ability to discriminate these action categories by adapting the so-called "Unwilling vs. Unable" paradigm. This paradigm compares subjects' reactions to intentional and unintentional human behaviour. All dogs received three conditions: In the unwilling-condition, an experimenter intentionally withheld a reward from them. In the two unable-conditions, she unintentionally withheld the reward, either because she was clumsy or because she was physically prevented from giving the reward to the dog. Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling-and unable-conditions. This indicates that dogs indeed distinguish intentional actions from unintentional behaviour. We critically discuss our findings with regard to dogs' understanding of human intentional action.
... The extent to which some areas of animal cognition are making progress is hotly debated [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. However, these debates are often performed by a minority of stakeholders in animal cognition research-often between those who claim discoveries of "higher" processes in animals and their corresponding 'killjoys' or skeptics, accompanied by a meta-commentary from a small number of interested researchers and philosophers. ...
Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field, but less so in their own work. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan’s canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses. Researchers self-reported that most of their studies had been published, however they often reported that studies went unpublished because they had negative or inconclusive results, or results that questioned “preferred” theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves—however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, 73.0% of respondents suggested areas of animal cognition research could experience a ‘replication crisis’ if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants’ free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, which are available as part of an open dataset. However, many researchers appeared concerned with how to interpret negative results, publication bias, theoretical bias and reliability in areas of animal cognition research. Collectively, these data provide a candid overview of barriers to progress in animal cognition and can inform debates on how individual researchers, as well as organizations and journals, can facilitate robust scientific research in animal cognition.
... The extent to which some areas of animal cognition are making progress is hotly debated (Allen, 2014;Anderson & Gallup, 2015;Barrett, 2015;Craig & Abramson, 2018;Despret et al., 2016;Eaton et al., 2018;Farrar & Ostojić, 2019;Heyes, 2015;Leavens et al., 2019;Penn & Povinelli, 2013;Povinelli, 2020). However, these debates are often performed by a minority of stakeholders in animal cognition research-often between those who claim discoveries of "higher" processes in animals and their corresponding 'killjoys' or skeptics, accompanied by a meta-commentary from a small number of interested researchers and philosophers. ...
Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field as a whole, but less so in their own work. Despite sometimes (39.7% of responses) or often (38.8% of responses) hoping for one result over another, researchers reported that they could often (45.8% of responses) or always (38.4% of responses) detach from any biases to perform objectively fair tests of animal cognition. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan’s canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses, and researchers self-reported that a median of 80% of their studies had been published. Their free-text responses suggested a stronger publication bias against negative and inconclusive results, and results that questioned “preferred” theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves — however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, and 44.7% of researchers agreed that their own area (44.7% of responses), or other areas (73.0% of responses) of research could experience a ‘replication crisis’ if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants’ free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, and highlighted many possible improvements. Overall, these data provide a picture of active researchers’ beliefs about the animal cognition research processes that can be used to inform debates on where and how the field can improve.
... Under existential pressure, such theistic imagination can also be the religious enforcement of social bonds to enhance the survival chance of social group (Norenzayan et al., 2016;Shilling & Mellor, 1998). Robust religion is unique to humans, because robust theory of mind is unique to humans (Heyes, 2015). According to Maurice Bloch (Bloch, 2006), the first widespread human religion was derived from the imagination to produce imaginary female figurines and imaginary cave paintings to helps them to survive under existential pressure at the time of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. ...
Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York in Albany (USA), the inventor of the mirror test for self-recognition in animals (see Chap. 10), has argued that self-consciousness also implies the attribution of consciousness in others [636]. The self, he argues, is social at its core, understanding itself from its position in the social matrix [637]. Empirical confirmation of this view comes from studies of patients. People who have difficulty imagining the thoughts and desires of others also have difficulty seeing into themselves, introspectively reflecting on their own actions, or anticipating the consequences of their own actions [638]. Of course, it is also conceivable to have self-awareness and yet not be able to think or feel one’s way into others. However, such a consciousness would be empty, trapped in a solipsistic mind, unable to exchange with others, coordinate its actions with those of others, or even cooperate with them. Yet, this is precisely the hallmark of human reason. Human culture is inconceivable without a theory of mind.
Animal minds are complex and diverse, making them difficult to study. This Element focuses on a question that has received much attention in the field of comparative cognition: 'Do animals reason about unobservable variables like force and mental states?' The Element shows how researchers design studies and gather evidence to address this question. Despite the many virtues of current methods, hypotheses in comparative cognition are often underdetermined by the empirical evidence. Given this, philosophers and scientists have recently called for additional behavioral constraints on theorizing in the field. The Element endorses this proposal (known as 'signature testing'), while also arguing that studies on animal minds would benefit from drawing more heavily on neuroscience and biology.
Premack and Woodruff (1978) coined the term “Theory of Mind” (ToM) in their pioneering paper entitled “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” This paper inspired a lot of animal and human research in cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, anthropology, behavior analysis, and other fields. Premack and Woodruff (1978) defined ToM as follows: “An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others.” In other words, an individual has ToM, if this individual has the ability to take another individual’s perspective into account and thereby can make a number of predictions about the other’s intentions, beliefs, emotions, thinking, perceptions, or other mental processes. The term ToM has frequently been misunderstood as implying that this is about a general, scientific theory of the workings of the mind. There are also unresolved, critical issues surrounding ToM such as the scientific conundrum of the “unobservable”, the logical fallacy of circular reasoning and reification, the neuroscientific correlates of ToM, the role of language as a prerequisite for ToM, and finally whether any nonhuman species possesses bona fide ToM. A possible approach to address these issues is offered by behavior analysis.
Philosophers often treat beliefs as propositional attitudes that entail taking the content as true. However, there exist certain mental states, such as delusions, that challenge this dogmatic norm, leading some researchers to question its validity. This chapter delves into that philosophical inquiry that surrounds the nature of beliefs and establishes a contrastive perspective in cases of delusion, self-deception, sectarian influence, and scientific negationism. We should explore the notion of privileged access to our own mental states acknowledging the importance of self-ascription as being more indirect than commonly believed. We may find that self-ascription is a result of our mindreading ability applied to ourselves and there could be a plausible biological evolution of the cognitive mechanism that underlies. This chapter discusses the evolutionary escalation of mindreading in humans, reviews philosophical accounts of mindreading, and evaluates different theories of belief self-attribution. It concludes with the implications for understanding belief-related phenomena and their cognitive underpinnings.
In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan's Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been duly considered. The Canon backfired largely because of Morgan's background metaphysical commitment to a univocal, hierarchical, and anthropocentric account of cognitive architecture. I make the case that, going forward, comparative psychologists would do well to pair judicious use of Morgan's Canon with an openness to the existence of non‐humanlike animal minds comprising phenomena belonging to distinct cognitive and folk psychological ontologies. And I argue that this case gives us pragmatic reason to reconcile deep—e.g., psychofunctionalist—and superficial—e.g., dispositionalist—approaches to the metaphysics of belief.
Comparative cognitive science often involves asking questions like ‘Do nonhumans have C?’ where C is a capacity we take humans to have. These questions frequently generate unproductive disagreements, in which one party affirms and the other denies that nonhumans have the relevant capacity on the basis of the same evidence. I argue that these questions can be productively understood as questions about natural kinds: do nonhuman capacities fall into the same natural kinds as our own? Understanding such questions in this way has several advantages: it preserves the intuition that these are substantive empirical questions worth asking; it helps us to understand why they so frequently give rise to disagreements of the kind described; and it provides clues about how to diagnose and resolve them.
Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms is an exploration of laboratory and field research on the many ways that evolution has influenced learning and memory processes, such as associative learning, social learning, and spatial, working, and episodic memory systems. This volume features research by both outstanding early-career scientists as well as familiar luminaries in the field. Learning and memory in a broad range of animals are explored, including numerous species of invertebrates (insects, worms, sea hares), as well as fish, amphibians, birds, rodents, bears, and human and nonhuman primates. Contributors discuss how the behavioral, cognitive, and neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory have been influenced by evolutionary pressures. They also draw connections between learning and memory and the specific selective factors that shaped their evolution. Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms should be a valuable resource for those working in the areas of experimental and comparative psychology, comparative cognition, brain–behavior evolution, and animal behavior.
Scientists often respond to failures to replicate by citing differences between the experimental components of an original study and those of its attempted replication. In this paper, we investigate these purported mismatch explanations. We assess a body of failures to replicate in neuroscience studies on spinal cord injury. We argue that a defensible mismatch explanation is one where (1) a mismatch of components is a difference maker for a mismatch of outcomes, and (2) the components are relevantly different in the follow-up study, given the scope of the original study. With this account, we argue that not all differences between studies are meaningful, even if they are difference makers. As our examples show, focusing only on these differences results in disregarding the representativeness of the original experiment’s components and the scope of its outcomes, undercutting other epistemic aims, such as translation, in the process.
In the present study we investigated the influence of positive and negative arousal situations and the presence of an audience on dogs’ behavioural displays and facial expressions. We exposed dogs to positive anticipation, non-social frustration and social frustration evoking test sessions and measured pre and post-test salivary cortisol concentrations. Cortisol concentration did not increase during the tests and there was no difference in pre or post-test concentrations in the different test conditions, excluding a different level of arousal. Displacement behaviours of “looking away” and “sniffing the environment” occurred more in the frustration-evoking situations compared to the positive anticipation and were correlated with cortisol concentrations. “Ears forward” occurred more in the positive anticipation condition compared to the frustration-evoking conditions, was positively influenced by the presence of an audience, and negatively correlated to the pre-test cortisol concentrations, suggesting it may be a good indicator of dogs’ level of attention. “Ears flattener”, “blink”, “nose lick”, “tail wagging” and “whining” were associated with the presence of an audience but were not correlated to cortisol concentrations, suggesting a communicative component of these visual displays. These findings are a first step to systematically test which subtle cues could be considered communicative signals in domestic dogs.
Over the past decade, noninvasive, restraint-free eye-tracking research with primates has transformed our understanding of primate social cognition. The use of this technology with many primate species allows for the exploration and comparison of how these species attend to and understand social agents and interactions. The ability to compare and contrast the cognitive capacities of various primate species, including humans, provides insight into the evolutionary mechanisms and selective pressures that have likely shaped social cognition in similar and divergent ways across the primate order. In this review, we begin by discussing noninvasive behavioral methods used to measure primate gaze and attention before the introduction of noninvasive, restraint-free eye-tracking methodologies. Next, we focus on findings from recent eye-tracking research on primate social cognition, beginning with simple visual and search mechanisms. We then discuss the results that have built on this basic understanding of how primates view images and videos, exploring discrimination and knowledge of social agents, following social cues, tracking perspectives and predicting behavior, and the combination of eye-tracking and other behavioral and physiological methods. Finally, we discuss some future directions of noninvasive eye-tracking research on primate social cognition and current eye-tracking work-in-progress that builds on these previous studies, investigating underexplored socio-cognitive capacities and utilizing new methodologies.
Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms is an exploration of laboratory and field research on the many ways that evolution has influenced learning and memory processes, such as associative learning, social learning, and spatial, working, and episodic memory systems. This volume features research by both outstanding early-career scientists as well as familiar luminaries in the field. Learning and memory in a broad range of animals are explored, including numerous species of invertebrates (insects, worms, sea hares), as well as fish, amphibians, birds, rodents, bears, and human and nonhuman primates. Contributors discuss how the behavioral, cognitive, and neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory have been influenced by evolutionary pressures. They also draw connections between learning and memory and the specific selective factors that shaped their evolution. Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms should be a valuable resource for those working in the areas of experimental and comparative psychology, comparative cognition, brain–behavior evolution, and animal behavior.
Resumen: Discuto dos interpretaciones de la posición del Wittgenstein tar-dío sobre la atribución de conceptos psicológicos referidos a capacidades y estados mentales a animales no humanos: el "enfoque de las habilidades" (Glock 2017) y el "enfoque del contextualismo de la forma de vida" (von Savigny 2016). Después aplico estas interpretaciones a líneas recientes de investigación sobre la cognición animal en los ámbitos de la etología cogni-tiva y la psicología animal y comparada. En la primera sección introduzco el problema exegético y en las siguientes dos expongo cada una de las dos inter-pretaciones. En la cuarta sección defiendo la conveniencia de complementar-las. En la quinta sección utilizo el marco wittgensteiniano para comprender la forma en que algunas líneas recientes de investigación sobre la cognición animal proponen sus hipótesis explicativas.
Palabras clave: mente animal; patrones de conducta; habilidades cognitivas sin lenguaje; conceptos sociales en animales; normatividad en animales
Abstract: I discuss two alternative versions of the later Wittgenstein's position on the attribution of psychological concepts to non-human animals: the "abilities' approach" (Glock 2017) and the "form of life contextualism" (von Savigny 2016). I then use these construals as frameworks in which to interpret recent research in animal cognition. Section 1 introduces the exegetical problem and the next sections present each one of the approaches (sections 2 and 3). Section 4 claims that one should complement both perspectives, and Section 5 makes use of the Wittgensteinian frame to understand the way in which recent scientific research on animal cognition develops its explanatory hypotheses.
Psychological essentialism is the ability to recognize that the class or kind to which an object belongs remains unaltered despite changes to its superficial perceptual features. It is unclear whether humans are unique in possessing this ability or whether it is present in nonhuman primates. A recent study with three great ape species found suggestive evidence of psychological essentialism, but further research is needed to rule out the alternative explanation that the apes used locational information to pass the test. We tested a bonobo (Pan paniscus) with specialized symbolic skills, Kanzi, using a modified procedure that avoided this alternative explanation. Kanzi passed the test, which required him to indicate which of two superficially identical but essentially different kinds of items was actually the item requested by the experimenter (e.g., successfully indicating the banana when both items looked like carrots). A control test indicated that he had not passed the essentialism test simply by detecting differences in the superficial appearance of the items. Our findings support the conclusion that great apes are capable of psychological essentialism; however, Kanzi is unique in that he is able to comprehend some simple spoken English and use lexigram symbols to communicate with humans. The extent to which these skills contributed to his essentialism is unknown. Further research designed to specify the limits of essentialism in bonobos, and other great apes, that are not symbol-proficient can inform debates about the phylogenetics of essentialism and the role of language in its development and expression.
Animal cognition covers various mental processes including perception, learning, decision-making and memory, and animal behavior is often used as a proxy for measuring cognition. Animal cognition/behavior research has multiple benefits; it provides fundamental knowledge of animal biology and evolution but can also have applied conservation and welfare applications. Zoos provide an excellent yet relatively untapped resource for animal cognition research, because they house a wide variety of species-many of which are under threat-and allow close observation and relatively high experimental control compared to the wild. Multi-zoo collaboration leads to increased sample size and species representation, which in turn leads to more robust science. However, there are salient challenges associated with zoo-based cognitive research, which are animal-based (e.g., small sample sizes at single zoos, untrained/unhabituated subjects, side effects) and human-based (e.g., time restrictions, safety concerns, and perceptions of animals interacting with unnatural technology or apparatus). We aim to increase the understanding and subsequent uptake of animal cognition research in zoos, by transparently outlining the main benefits and challenges. Importantly, we use our own research (1) a study on novelty responses in hornbills, and (2) a multi-site collaboration called the "ManyBirds" Project to demonstrate how challenges may be overcome. These potential options include using "drop and go" apparatuses that require no training, close human contact or animal separation. This study is aimed at zoo animal care and research staff, as well as external researchers interested in zoo-based studies.
The cognitive ability to think about other people's psychological states is known as `mindreading'. This Element critiques assumptions that have been formative in shaping philosophical theories of mindreading: that mindreading is ubiquitous, underpinning the vast majority of our social interactions; and that its primary goal is to provide predictions and explanations of other people's behaviour. It begins with an overview of key positions and empirical literature in the debate. It then introduces and motivates the pluralist turn in this literature, which challenges the core assumptions of the traditional views. The second part of the Element uses case studies to further motivate the pluralist framework, and to advocate the pluralist approach as the best way to progress our understanding of social cognitive phenomena.
Comparative analysis of higher cognitive abilities in animals provides for assessment of the evolutionary underpinnings of the formation of human thought and language. This review will address the main approaches to studies of thought in animals and analyze the data obtained using these approaches. The results of a diversity of tests indicate that animals with high levels of brain development have a wide spectrum of cognitive abilities. As expected, the widest spectrum is found in the great apes. A quite similar spectrum is found in higher members of the class Aves (corvids and psittacines) despite their different brain structure. Convergent similarity in the level of development of cognitive abilities in higher mammals and birds reflects the operation of common factors determining their evolution. Comparison of several corvid and psittacine species indicates that the high levels of development of their cognitive abilities are due to the high levels of organization of the brains of these species rather than ecological characteristics.
Animal cognition covers various mental processes including perception, learning, decision-making and memory, and animal behavior is often used as a proxy for measuring cognition. Animal cognition/behavior research has multiple benefits; it provides fundamental knowledge on animal biology and evolution but can also have applied conservation and welfare applications. Zoos provide an excellent yet relatively untapped resource for animal cognition research, because they house a wide variety of species - many of which are under threat - and allow close observation and relatively high experimental control compared to the wild. Multi-zoo collaboration leads to increased sample size and species representation, which in turn leads to more robust science. However, there are salient challenges associated with zoo-based cognitive research, which are subject-based (e.g., small sample sizes at single zoos, untrained/unhabituated subjects, site effects) and human-based (e.g., time restrictions, safety concerns, and perceptions of animals interacting with unnatural technology or apparatus). We aim to increase the understanding and subsequent uptake of animal cognition research in zoos, by transparently outlining the main benefits and challenges. Importantly, we use our own research (1) a study on novelty responses in hornbills, and (2) a multi-zoo collaboration called the ‘ManyBirds’ project to demonstrate how challenges may be overcome. These potential options include using ‘drop and go’ apparatuses that require no training, close human contact or animal separation. This article is aimed at zoo animal care and research staff, as well as external researchers interested in zoo-based studies.
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Zoos are an excellent yet relatively untapped resource for animal cognition research.
Zoo cognition research has historically been challenging, and traditional laboratory paradigms often do not translate well to the majority of zoos.
Salient challenges of zoo-based cognitive research can be overcome by using less restrictive test apparatuses, limiting animal training and isolation, and subscribing to multi-zoo collaborative programs.
Questo lavoro analizza la possibile distinzione tra Teoria della Mente [ToM] minima e completa. In particolare, verrà preso in considerazione il tentativo compiuto da Butterfill e Apperly di costruire una ToM minima direttamente in maniera mentalistica, allo scopo di salvare la dignità delle capacità cognitive sociali mostrate dai bambini in fase preverbale e dagli animali non umani. Verranno criticate tanto la costruzione nel suo insieme, quanto l’interpretazione mentalistica della ToM, suggerendo che le ipotesi della lettura dei comportamenti e del sistema continuista dello sviluppo potrebbero più facilmente spiegare le differenze nelle abilità di ToM. Infine, verrà suggerito di considerare la ToM nella sua forma minima come l’unica possibile ToM, considerandola come un meccanismo cognitivo semplice utilizzato attraverso le abilità di apprendimento sociale.
In this paper I will focus on the possible distinction between minimal and full-blown Theory of Mind [ToM]. Particularly, I will analyse the attempt of Butterfill and Apperly to build a minimal ToM in a truly mentalistic way, in order to save the dignity of social cognitive capacities shown by preverbal human children and nonhuman animals. I will argue both, their whole construction and the mentalistic interpretation of the ToM, suggesting that the simple behavioural reading and the one-system developmental accounts would easily explain differences in ToMs’ abilities. Finally, I will suggest to consider ToM in its minimal form as the only possible ToM, taking it as a simple cognitive mechanism exploited through social learning abilities.
It is not just a manner of speaking: “Mind reading,” or working out what others are thinking and feeling, is markedly similar
to print reading. Both of these distinctly human skills recover meaning from signs, depend on dedicated cortical areas, are
subject to genetically heritable disorders, show cultural variation around a universal core, and regulate how people behave.
But when it comes to development, the evidence is conflicting. Some studies show that, like learning to read print, learning
to read minds is a long, hard process that depends on tuition. Others indicate that even very young, nonliterate infants are
already capable of mind reading. Here, we propose a resolution to this conflict. We suggest that infants are equipped with
neurocognitive mechanisms that yield accurate expectations about behavior (“automatic” or “implicit” mind reading), whereas
“explicit” mind reading, like literacy, is a culturally inherited skill; it is passed from one generation to the next by verbal
instruction.
Previous studies using the dot perspective task have shown that adults are slower to verify the number of dots they can see in a picture when a human figure in the picture, an avatar, can see a different number of dots. This "self-consistency effect," which occurs even when the avatar's perspective is formally task-irrelevant, has been interpreted as evidence of implicit mentalizing; that humans can think about the mental states of others via dedicated, automatic processes. We tested this interpretation by giving participants 2 versions of the dot perspective task. In some trials, the avatar was presented as in previous experiments, and in other trials the avatar was replaced by an arrow with similar low-level features. We found self-consistency effects of comparable size in the avatar and arrow conditions, suggesting that self-consistency effects in the dot perspective task are due to domain-general processes such as those that mediate automatic attentional orienting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
There is a persistent methodological problem in primate mindreading research, dubbed the 'logical problem,' over how to determine experimentally whether chimpanzees are mindreaders or just clever behavior-readers of a certain sort. The problem has persisted long enough that some researchers have concluded that it is intractable. The logical problem, I argue, is tractable but only with experimental protocols that are fundamentally different from those that have been currently used or suggested. In the first section, I describe what the logical problem is (and is not) and how it can, in principle, be solved. In the second section, I illustrate how a well-known experimental protocol by Hare et al. (2000) fails to solve the logical problem. In the third section, I do the same for a protocol by Heyes (1998). (I do the same in the appendix for a recently suggested protocol by Penn and Povinelli (2007).) In the fourth section, I describe a novel experimental protocol for visual perspective-taking and argue that it succeeds to discriminate between the relevant mindreading and behavior-reading hypotheses. In addition, this new experimental protocol employs procedures that are realistic enough to suppose that chimpanzees might very well succeed in passing them.
A challenging issue in the comparative and developmental literature concerns the effort to define and describe the underlying nature of concepts and representations. This volume represents an attempt to define perception, and what it might mean for an organism to have a "theory of perception." Typically, if an organism is able to differentiate between different objects, making operational choices between them, that organism is said to have an understanding of the objects' different properties, or at least to have discriminated between them in a meaningful way. If the organism can predict that different objects will have differential effects on the world that organism may be said to have some limited causal understanding. Adding complexity to the study of such topics is the issue of implicit versus explicit levels of understanding. To act on objects in the world in meaningfully different ways is not necessarily functionally equivalent to reflecting on those objects, or one's own actions, in a conscious or metacognitive manner. As evolutionary psychologists, our focus has been to understand how our closest living relatives may be both similar to and different from humans in their approach to solving social and physical problems. We have previously proposed that one critical way in which non-humans, even the other apes, may differ from humans, is in their ability to represent and reason about unobservables (Povinelli, 2004; Vonk and Povinelli, 2006). We posit that to have a true "theory" of objects or other organisms (whether it be a theory of perception or a theory of mind), an organism must represent * This work was supported by a Centennial Fellowship to DJP from the James S. McDonnell Founda-tion, funded from the State of Louisiana. The participation of the chimpanzees and their caretakers is gratefully acknowledged. These studies could not have taken place without the hard work and dedication of several individuals including
A challenging issue in the comparative and developmental literature concerns the effort to define and describe the underlying nature of concepts and representations. This volume represents an attempt to define perception, and what it might mean for an organism to have a "theory of perception." Typically, if an organism is able to differentiate between different objects, making operational choices between them, that organism is said to have an understanding of the objects' different properties, or at least to have discriminated between them in a meaningful way. If the organism can predict that different objects will have differential effects on the world that organism may be said to have some limited causal understanding. Adding complexity to the study of such topics is the issue of implicit versus explicit levels of understanding. To act on objects in the world in meaningfully different ways is not necessarily functionally equivalent to reflecting on those objects, or one's own actions, in a conscious or metacognitive manner. As evolutionary psychologists, our focus has been to understand how our closest living relatives may be both similar to and different from humans in their approach to solving social and physical problems. We have previously proposed that one critical way in which non-humans, even the other apes, may differ from humans, is in their ability to represent and reason about unobservables (Povinelli, 2004; Vonk and Povinelli, 2006). We posit that to have a true "theory" of objects or other organisms (whether it be a theory of perception or a theory of mind), an organism must represent * This work was supported by a Centennial Fellowship to DJP from the James S. McDonnell Founda-tion, funded from the State of Louisiana. The participation of the chimpanzees and their caretakers is gratefully acknowledged. These studies could not have taken place without the hard work and dedication of several individuals including
The ability to predict how another individual will behave is useful in social competition. Chimpanzees can predict the behaviour of another based on what they observe her to see, hear, know and infer. Here we show that chimpanzees act on the assumption that others have preferences that match their own. All subjects began with a preference for a box with a picture of food over one with a picture of nothing, even though the pictures had no causal relation to the contents. In a back-and-forth food competition, chimpanzees then avoided the box with the picture of food when their competitor had chosen one of the boxes before them-presumably on the assumption that the competitor shared their own preference for it and had already chosen it. Chimpanzees predicted that their competitor's preference would match their own and adjusted their behavioural strategies accordingly.
An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory because such states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others. As to the mental states the chimpanzee may infer, consider those inferred by our own species, for example, purpose or intention, as well as knowledge, belief, thinking, doubt, guessing, pretending, liking, and so forth. To determine whether or not the chimpanzee infers states of this kind, we showed an adult chimpanzee a series of videotaped scenes of a human actor struggling with a variety of problems. Some problems were simple, involving inaccessible food – bananas vertically or horizontally out of reach, behind a box, and so forth – as in the original Kohler problems; others were more complex, involving an actor unable to extricate himself from a locked cage, shivering because of a malfunctioning heater, or unable to play a phonograph because it was unplugged. With each videotape the chimpanzee was given several photographs, one a solution to the problem, such as a stick for the inaccessible bananas, a key for the locked up actor, a lit wick for the malfunctioning heater. The chimpanzee's consistent choice of the correct photographs can be understood by assuming that the animal recognized the videotape as representing a problem, understood the actor's purpose, and chose alternatives compatible with that purpose.
Using cooperation in chimpanzees as a case study, this article argues that research on animal minds needs to steer a course between 'association-blindness'--the failure to consider associative learning as a candidate explanation for complex behaviour--and 'simple-mindedness'--the assumption that associative explanations trump more cognitive hypotheses. Association-blindness is challenged by the evidence that associative learning occurs in a wide range of taxa and functional contexts, and is a major force guiding the development of complex human behaviour. Furthermore, contrary to a common view, association-blindness is not entailed by the rejection of behaviourism. Simple-mindedness is founded on Morgan's canon, a methodological principle recommending 'lower' over 'higher' explanations for animal behaviour. Studies in the history and philosophy of science show that Morgan failed to offer an adequate justification for his canon, and subsequent attempts to justify the canon using evolutionary arguments and appeals to simplicity have not been successful. The weaknesses of association-blindness and simple-mindedness imply that there are no short-cuts to finding out about animal minds. To decide between associative and yet more cognitive explanations for animal behaviour, we have to spell them out in sufficient detail to allow differential predictions, and to test these predictions through observation and experiment.
There is considerable debate in comparative psychology and philosophy over whether nonhuman animals can attribute beliefs.
The empirical studies that suggest that they can are shown to be inconclusive, and the main philosophical and empirical arguments
that purport to show they cannot are shown to be invalid or weak. What is needed to move the debate and the field forward,
it is argued, is a fundamentally new experimental protocol for testing belief attribution in animals, one capable of distinguishing
genuine belief-attributing subjects from their perceptual-state attributing and behavior-reading counterparts. Such a protocol
is outlined and defended. The rest, it is argued, is in the hands of experimentalists.
Almost two decades of research on the self-recognition capacity of non-human primates has produced evidence of intriguing
phylogenetic differences. Not a single species of monkey has demonstrated the ability to recognize its own reflection in a
mirror, despite some claims to the contrary. To date, only humans, orangutans and chimpanzees have passed objective tests
of mirror-recognition. This paper reviews the methodology and evidence for self-recognition in primates along with the assumption
that this ability is an indicator of self-awareness. The failure of the gorilla to master the task is discussed in some detail,
along with an evaluation of anecdotal evidence of self-recognition by at least one gorilla. Also, the evolutionary backdrop
of the primates is considered with reference to this unique behavior. Evidence supporting alternate, non-cognitive interpretations
of self-recognition is assessed.
Four chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, were individually trained to cooperate with a human partner on a task that allowed both participants to obtain food rewards. In each chimpanzee-human dyad, one of the participants (the informant) could see which pair of food trays on a four-choice apparatus was baited, but had no means of obtaining it. The other participant (the operator) could pull one of four handles to bring a pair of the trays within reach of both participants, but could not see which choice was correct. Two of the chimpanzees were initially trained as informants and adopted spontaneous gestures to indicate the location of the food. The two other chimpanzees were trained as operators and learned to respond to the pointing of their human partner. After the chimpanzee subjects reached near perfect performance, the roles in each chimpanzee-human dyad were reversed. Three of the four chimpanzees showed immediate evidence of comprehension of their new social role. The results are discussed in the context of cognitive empathy and the potential for future research on social attribution in non-human primates.
Chimpanzee's perspective-taking abilities are currently disputed. Here we show that in some food competition contexts, subordinate chimpanzees do take the visual perspective of dominant individuals, preferentially targeting a hidden piece of the food that the dominant cannot see over a piece that is visible to both individuals. However, the space where the animals compete is critical in determining whether subjects demonstrate this skill. We suggest that competition intensity, as mediated by these spatial factors, may play an important role in determining the strategy chimpanzees utilize in competitive contexts. Since some strategies may not require visual perspective taking in order to be successful, chimpanzees may not always demonstrate this skill. Differences in spatial arrangement may therefore account for the conflicting results of past studies.
In the research reported here, we investigated whether 18-month-olds would use their own past experience of visual access to attribute perception and consequent beliefs to other people. Infants in this study wore either opaque blindfolds (opaque condition) or trick blindfolds that looked opaque but were actually transparent (trick condition). Then both groups of infants observed an actor wearing one of the same blindfolds that they themselves had experienced, while a puppet removed an object from its location. Anticipatory eye movements revealed that infants who had experienced opaque blindfolds expected the actor to behave in accordance with a false belief about the object's location, but that infants who had experienced trick blindfolds did not exhibit that expectation. Our results suggest that 18-month-olds used self-experience with the blindfolds to assess the actor's visual access and to update her belief state accordingly. These data constitute compelling evidence that 18-month-olds infer perceptual access and appreciate its causal role in altering the epistemic states of other people.
If chimpanzees are faced with two opaque boards on a table, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, they do not choose the board lying flat (because if food was under there it would not be lying flat) but, rather, they choose the slanted one- presumably inferring that some unperceived food underneath is causing the slant. Here we demonstrate that chimpanzees know that other chimpanzees in the same situation will make a similar inference. In a back-and-forth foraging game, when their competitor had chosen before them, chimpanzees tended to avoid the slanted board on the assumption that the competitor had already chosen it. Chimpanzees can determine the inferences that a conspecific is likely to make and then adjust their competitive strategies accordingly.
Differentiating between individuals with different knowledge states is an important step in child development and has been considered as a hallmark in human evolution. Recently, primates and corvids have been reported to pass knower-guesser tasks, raising the possibility of mental attribution skills in non-human animals. Yet, it has been difficult to distinguish 'mind-reading' from behaviour-reading alternatives, specifically the use of behavioural cues and/or the application of associatively learned rules. Here, I show that ravens (Corvus corax) observing an experimenter hiding food are capable of predicting the behaviour of bystanders that had been visible at both, none or just one of two caching events. Manipulating the competitors' visual field independently of the view of the test-subject resulted in an instant drop in performance, whereas controls for behavioural cues had no such effect. These findings indicate that ravens not only remember whom they have seen at caching but also take into account that the other's view was blocked. Notably, it does not suffice for the birds to associate specific competitors with specific caches. These results support the idea that certain socio-ecological conditions may select for similar cognitive abilities in distantly related species and that some birds have evolved analogous precursors to a human theory-of-mind.
In a series of three visual perspective-taking experiments, we asked adult participants to judge their own or someone else's visual perspective in situations where both perspectives were either the same or different. We found that participants could not easily ignore what someone else saw when making self-perspective judgments. This was observed even when participants were only required to take their own perspective within the same block of trials (Experiment 2) or even within the entire experiment (Experiment 3), i.e. under conditions which gave participants a clear opportunity to adopt a strategy of ignoring the other person's irrelevant perspective. Under some circumstances, participants were also more efficient at judging the other person's perspective than at judging their own perspective. Collectively, these results suggest that adults make use of rapid and efficient processes to compute what other people can see.
When presented with a face stimulus whose gaze is diverted, observers' attention shifts to locations fixated by the face. Such "gaze following" has been characterized by some previous studies as a consequence of sophisticated theory of mind processes, but by others (particularly those employing the "gaze-cuing" paradigm) as an involuntary response that is triggered directly and reflexively by the physical features of a face. To address this apparent contradiction, we modified the gaze-cuing paradigm using a deception procedure to convince observers that prerecorded videos of an experimenter making head turns and wearing mirrored goggles were a "live" video link to an adjacent room. In two experiments, reflexive gaze following was found when observers believed that the model was wearing transparent goggles and could see, but it was significantly reduced when they believed that the experimenter wore opaque goggles and could not see. These results indicate that the attribution of the mental state "seeing" to a face plays a role in controlling even reflexive gaze following.
Using a gaze-following task, the authors assessed whether self-experience with the view-obstructing properties of blindfolds influenced infants' understanding of this effect in others. In Experiment 1, 12-month-olds provided with blindfold self-experience behaved as though they understood that a person wearing a blindfold cannot see. When a blindfolded adult turned to face an object, these infants gaze followed significantly less than control infants who had either (a) seen and felt the blindfold but whose view had not been obstructed by it or (b) experienced a windowed blindfold through which they could see. In Experiment 2, 18-month-olds experienced either (a) a trick blindfold that looked opaque but could be seen through, (b) an opaque blindfold, or (c) baseline familiarization. Infants receiving trick-blindfold experience now followed a blindfolded adult's gaze significantly more than controls. The authors propose 3 mechanisms underlying infants' capacity to use self-experience as a framework for understanding the visual perception of others.
The visual perspective-taking ability of 4 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) was investigated. The subjects chose between information about the location of hidden food provided by 2 experimenters who randomly alternated between two roles (the guesser and the knower). The knower baited 1 of 4 obscured cups so that the subjects could watch the process but could not see which of the cups contained the reward. The guesser waited outside the room until the food was hidden. Finally, the knower pointed to the correct cup while the guesser pointed to an incorrect one. The chimpanzees quickly learned to respond to the knower. They also showed transfer to a novel variation of the task, in which the guesser remained inside the room and covered his head while the knower stood next to him and watched a third experimenter bait the cups. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that chimpanzees are capable of modeling the visual perspectives of others.
How people assign mental states to others and how they represent or conceptualize such states in the first place are topics of interest to philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Three competing answers to the question of how people impute mental states to others have been offered: by rationalizing, by theorizing, or by simulating. Simulation theory says that mindreaders produce mental states in their own minds that resemble, or aim to resemble, those of their targets; these states are then imputed to, or projected onto, the targets. In low-level mindreading, such as reading emotions from faces, simulation is mediated by automatic mirror systems. More controlled processes of simulation, here called “enactment imagination”, are used in high-level mindreading. Just as visual and motor imagery are attempts to replicate acts of seeing and doing, mindreading is characteristically an attempt to replicate the mental processes of a target, followed by projection of the imagination-generated state onto the target. Projection errors are symptomatic of simulation, because one’s own genuine states readily intrude into the simulational process. A nuanced form of introspection is introduced to explain self-attribution and also to address the question of how mental concepts are represented. A distinctive cognitive code involving introspective representations figures prominently in our concepts of mental states. The book concludes with an overview of the pervasive effects on social life of simulation, imitation, and empathy, and charts their possible roles in moral experience and the fictive arts.
This chapter scrutinizes the rich pool of behavioural measures of metacognition used with animals for devising new procedures that do not depend on verbalizing mental states for assessing metacognition in young children and infants. To help select the optimal methods I formulated two conceptual problems besetting the metacognitive interpretation of behavioural data: (1) does the critical behaviour depend only on the animal's cognitive ability to be in a particular mental state or does it depend on the animal's metacognitive awareness of being in that state? (2) Does the critical behaviour really depend on recognizing being in a particular mental state (e.g. being disgusted, being uncertain) or is it dependent only on typically confounded external conditions eliciting these states (e.g. facing something disgusting, facing a difficult task)? The assessment concludes that no single task can unambiguously answer these questions. This chapter's contribution to devising behavioural tests of metacognition for children consists only in formulating my two problems and setting the bar of criteria for future investigations.
This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about animal rationality and mental processing in animals. This book discusses the theoretical issues and distinctions that bear on attributions of rationality to animals and draws some contrasts between rationality and certain other traits of animals to determine the relationships between them. It explores the relations between behaviour and the processes that explain behaviour, and the senses in which animal behaviour might be rational in virtue of features other than classical reasoning processes on the human model.
Theory of mind, or "mindreading" as it is termed in this book, is the ability to think about beliefs, desires, knowledge and intentions. It has been studied extensively by developmental and comparative psychologists and more recently by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists. This book is the first to draw together these diverse findings in an account of the cognitive basis of "theory of mind", and establishes the systematic study of these abilities in adults as a new field of enquiry. Apperly focuses on perceptions, knowledge and beliefs as paradigm cases of mindreading, and uses this as a basis from which more general lessons can be drawn. The book argues that an account of the cognitive basis of mindreading is necessary for making sense of findings from neuroscience and developmental and comparative psychology, as well as for understanding how mindreading fits more broadly into the cognitive system. It questions standard philosophical accounts of mindreading, and suggests a move away from the notion that it consists simply of having a "theory of mind". This unique study into the cognitive basis of mindreading will be ideal reading for academics and advanced students from the diverse disciplines that have studied theory of mind in particular, and social cognition more generally.
It is 35 years since Premack & Woodruff famously asked, 'Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?' (1978, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 515-526). The first wave of experiments designed to tackle this provocative question in the context of cooperative transactions with humans offered largely negative answers. It was not until a landmark Animal Behaviour paper by Hare et al. (2000, Animal Behaviour, 59, 771-786) that a different approach based around foraging competition between conspecifics delivered an affirmative (if limited) verdict that, at least, 'Chimpanzees know what conspecifics do and do not see'. This influential paper laid the foundations for a much more productive decade of studies that provided evidence for apes' recognition in others of states corresponding to knowing, intending and inferring. It further stimulated related studies in other mammalian and avian species too. Here I set the Hare et al. paper in its historical, scientific context, provide an overview of the variety of studies that have followed in its wake and address some core questions about the scientific tractability of identifying phenomena in nonverbal creatures that may be akin to human 'theory of mind'.
The nativist view of mentalizing-the view that humans have an inherent capacity to think about the mental states of others-has been recently reinvigorated by reports that adults and infants automatically represent mental states-that they engage in implicit mentalizing. In this article, I take a close look at the strongest evidence of implicit mentalizing in adults, which suggests that people automatically represent what others see, intend, and believe. I argue that although these experiments have been ingeniously designed and carefully implemented, they do not provide evidence of implicit mentalizing because their results could be due instead to submentalizing-domain-general cognitive mechanisms that simulate the effects of mentalizing in social contexts. These include the processes that mediate involuntary attentional orienting, spatial coding of response locations, object-centered spatial coding of stimulus locations, retroactive interference, and distraction. If my analysis is correct, it suggests that the same domain-general processes can provide a fast and efficient alternative to mentalizing in everyday life, allowing people to navigate a wide range of social situations without thinking about mental states. Thus, submentalizing could be both a substrate and a substitute for mentalizing.
© The Author(s) 2014.
Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements.
Can infants appreciate that others have false beliefs? Do they have a theory of mind? In this article I provide a detailed review of more than 20 experiments that have addressed these questions, and offered an affirmative answer, using nonverbal 'violation of expectation' and 'anticipatory looking' procedures. Although many of these experiments are both elegant and ingenious, I argue that their results can be explained by the operation of domain-general processes and in terms of 'low-level novelty'. This hypothesis suggests that the infants' looking behaviour is a function of the degree to which the observed (perceptual novelty) and remembered or expected (imaginal novelty) low-level properties of the test stimuli - their colours, shapes and movements - are novel with respect to events encoded by the infants earlier in the experiment. If the low-level novelty hypothesis is correct, research on false belief in infancy currently falls short of demonstrating that infants have even an implicit theory of mind. However, I suggest that the use of two experimental strategies - inanimate control procedures, and self-informed belief induction - could be used in combination with existing methods to bring us much closer to understanding the evolutionary and developmental origins of theory of mind.
Much contemporary psychology assumes a fundamental distinction between associative explanations of animal behaviour, in term of unthinking 'conditioned responses', and rational explanations, which credit animals with relevant 'knowledge' or 'understanding' or 'concepts'. This paper argues that this dichotomy is both unclear and methodologically unhelpful, serving only to distract attention from serious questions about which cognitive abilities are present in which animals. We illustrate the issues by considering recent experimental work on imitation in Japanese quail.
Three methods (anecdote collection, conditional discrimination training and trapping) used to investigate the possibility that primates attribute mental states are evaluated with reference to recent studies employing these methods. No convincing evidence of the phenomenon is found, and it is argued that none of these current methods could provide such evidence. In each case, behaviour consistent with the attribution of a mental state to an interactant could also be the result of associative or inferential learning about observable properties of the interactant's appearance or behaviour. A fourth method of investigation, which triangulates on mental state attribution using conditional discrimination training followed by transfer tests, is recommended as having the potential to provide evidence of mental state attribution in animals. It is argued that progress in this field has been hampered by a lack of full recognition that animals may learn inferentially about observables, and engage in associative learning without explicit training; and by misconstrual of the relationship between 'behaviourism' and mental state attribution.
concentrate in this chapter on the effects of experience on perceptual organization
modification of perceptual organization / effects of discrimination training / exposure learning
mechanisms for reducing associability
increases in discriminability (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Responds to C. M. Heyes's (see record
1993-44239-001) comments on experiments with chimpanzees which were designed to reveal whether the Ss attributed mental states to others. It is pointed out that no strong evidence was seen in the experiments that the chimpanzees understood the relationship between seeing and knowing. Heyes's suggestion for correcting the methodology of the experiment is seen as inappropriate, and a modified experimental design is offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studied communication about the location of a hidden incentive in chimpanzee–human dyads, in which each member of a pair served alternately as "sender" and "recipient" of information. Ss were 4 African-born chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes). When the human cooperated with the Ss in finding the goal, from the very beginning Ss were able to produce and comprehend behavioral cues that conveyed accurate locational information. When the human and S competed for the goal, Ss learned both to withhold information or mislead the recipient, and to discount or controvert the sender's own misleading cues. Ss' ability to convey and utilize both accurate and misleading information, by taking into account the nature of the sender or recipient, provides evidence of a capacity for intentional communication in this nonhuman primate species. (French summary) (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tactical deception occurs when an individual is able to use an “honest” act from his normal repertoire in a different context to mislead familiar individuals. Although primates have a reputation for social skill, most primate groups are so intimate that any deception is likely to be subtle and infrequent. Published records are sparse and often anecdotal. We have solicited new records from many primatologists and searched for repeating patterns. This has revealed several different forms of deceptive tactic, which we classify in terms of the function they perform. For each class, we sketch the features of another individual's state of mind that an individual acting with deceptive intent must be able to represent, thus acting as a “natural psychologist.” Our analysis will sharpen attention to apparent taxonomic differences. Before these findings can be generalized, however, behavioral scientists must agree on some fundamental methodological and theoretical questions in the study of the evolution of social cognition.
The traditional approach for studying the evolutionary emergence of human social cognition is based on comparisons with apes and monkeys as model species with a homologous relationship to other primates and humans. Recently, however, research interest has focused on other species offering analogous models for the evolution of human social cognitive abilities. Here we suggest that convergent social evolution in dogs can be used to model the early state of human social evolution, suggesting that functionally analogous forms of many traits of the human behavioral complex are present in dogs. We argue that the dog as a model species is unique among domesticated species because (a) many aspects of dog behavior are functionally analogous to the corresponding human traits, (b) socialization to humans is a natural process in dogs, (c) comparison with the ancestor is important for convergent modeling, and (d) the dog represents a natural experimental model for studying human behavior.
Infants, chimpanzees, scrub-jays and adults under cognitive load can all act in ways whose success is contingent on facts about what others perceive and believe. How are they able to do this? Some hold that it is by means of representing perceptions and beliefs as such, others counter that it is by representing behaviour only. Nei-ther view fits the available evidence. This paper describes the con-struction of a third alternative, minimal theory of mind, capable of explaining how those with limited cognitive resources or little con-ceptual sophistication may systematically succeed on tasks held to be acid tests for theory of mind including many false belief tasks.
The question of whether chimpanzees, like humans, reason about unobservable mental states remains highly controversial. On one account, chimpanzees are seen as possessing a psychological system for social cognition that represents and reasons about behaviors alone. A competing account allows that the chimpanzee's social cognition system additionally construes the behaviors it represents in terms of mental states. Because the range of behaviors that each of the two systems can generate is not currently known, and because the latter system depends upon the former, determining the presence of this latter system in chimpanzees is a far more difficult task than has been assumed. We call for recognition of this problem, and a shift from experimental paradigms that cannot resolve this question, to ones that might allow researchers to intelligently determine when it is necessary to postulate the presence of a system which reasons about both behavior and mental states.
How people assign mental states to others and how they represent or conceptualize such states in the first place are topics of interest to philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Three competing answers to the question of how people impute mental states to others have been offered: by rationalizing, by theorizing, or by simulating. Simulation theory says that mindreaders produce mental states in their own minds that resemble, or aim to resemble, those of their targets; these states are then imputed to, or projected onto, the targets. In low-level mindreading, such as reading emotions from faces, simulation is mediated by automatic mirror systems. More controlled processes of simulation, here called "enactment imagination", are used in high-level mindreading. Just as visual and motor imagery are attempts to replicate acts of seeing and doing, mindreading is characteristically an attempt to replicate the mental processes of a target, followed by projection of the imagination-generated state onto the target. Projection errors are symptomatic of simulation, because one's own genuine states readily intrude into the simulational process. A nuanced form of introspection is introduced to explain self-attribution and also to address the question of how mental concepts are represented. A distinctive cognitive code involving introspective representations figures prominently in our concepts of mental states. The book concludes with an overview of the pervasive effects on social life of simulation, imitation, and empathy, and charts their possible roles in moral experience and the fictive arts.
The ability of monkeys to attribute mental states such as ignorance to each other was examined in two experiments using four captive groups of Japanese and rhesus macaques, Macaca fuscata and M. mulatta. In the first experiment, females were shown food or a predator, either in the presence of their offspring or alone, to determine whether they would attempt to alert ignorant offspring more than knowledgeable ones. The behaviour of mothers appeared to be unaffected by the knowledge of their offspring. In the second experiment, a juvenile offspring of a dominant female was isolated in an enclosure with a normally subordinate adult female while the juvenile's mother sat nearby behind either a glass barrier, an opaque barrier or a one-way mirror. In the mirror condition, the two subjects could see the mother, but she could not see them. The behaviour of subjects under the mirror condition was intermediate between that under the glass and opaque conditions. Subjects were probably sensitive to the mother's orientation and attentiveness, but there was no evidence that they recognized the difference between their own visual perspective and that of the mother.
After a wild chimpanzee encounters a model of a dangerous snake, whether or not he gives an alarm call depends on his perception of another individual's knowledge.
Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other "theory of mind" processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task tapped executive function. Results suggested that the secondary task did not affect the calculation of perspective, but did affect the selection of the relevant (Self or Other) perspective for a given trial. This is the first direct evidence of a cognitively efficient process for "theory of mind" in adults that operates independently of executive function. The contrast between this and previous findings points to a distinction between simple perspective-taking and the more complex and cognitively demanding abilities more typically examined in studies of "theory of mind". It is suggested that these findings may provide a parsimonious explanation of the success of infants on 'indirect' measures of perspective-taking that do not explicitly require selection of the relevant perspective.