Vocal responsiveness in male wild chimpanzees: implications for the evolution of language

Several captive chimpanzees and bonobos have learned to use symbols and to comprehend syntax. Thus, compared with other nonhumans, these animals appear to have unusual cognitive powers that can be recruited for communicative behavior. This raises the possibility that wild chimpanzee vocal communication is more complex than heretofore demonstrated. To examine this possibility, I investigated whether wild chimpanzee vocal exchanges exhibit uniquely human conversational attributes. The results indicate that wild chimpanzees vocalize at low rates, tend not to respond to calls that they hear, and, when they do respond, tend to give calls that are similar to the ones they have heard. Thus, chimpanzee vocal interactions resemble those of other primate species, and show no special similarity to human conversations. The results support the view that we need to explore cognitive and social continuities and discontinuities with nonhuman primates to understand the origin and evolution of language, but also emphasize the need for fine-grained analyses of wild chimpanzee vocal interactions.     

Illusion susceptibility in domestic dogs

Domestic dogs play many vital roles in human lives; however, relatively little is known about how they perceive the world visually. Given dogs’ recent popularity as a subject in cognitive and behavioural studies, it is important to understand how they visually interpret the world around them. One way to evaluate perception is to assess illusion susceptibility; specifically, how visual information is processed, interpreted and modified post-retinally. While illusion susceptibility has been used across a variety of species to comparatively assess the similarities and differences in visual processing and perception, this relatively novel methodological approach has only recently been adapted to evaluate perception in domestic dogs. Here, we present a comprehensive overview of the findings from studies that have evaluated domestic dogs’ illusion susceptibility, highlighting the relevance of these results for those studying illusion susceptibility in animals as well as canine behaviour and cognition. More specifically, the ultimate goal of this review is to answer the questions: (a) Are dogs susceptible to visual illusions? (b) If so, are they susceptible to illusions in a way that parallels humans and/or other animals? (c) Are findings, within dogs, consistent and if not, how might these be interpreted and explained?     

Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants

A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various non-human animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people''s mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults, form representations of other agents'' mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neurocognitive bases of eight-month-olds'' ability to encode the world from another person''s perspective, using gamma-band electroencephalographic activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants'' perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared, but the person falsely believed the object to be present (study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants'' own perspective are also recruited for encoding others'' beliefs. Such results point to an early-developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations, and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.     

Wild Minds: What People Think about Animal Thinking

ABSTRACT

The question of how nonhuman animals think is pervasive in the scientific and popular media, yet there is an apparent lack of concordance between findings from research in animal cognition and how this information emerges in popular discourse. The present study investigated the way people conceive of animal thinking, in order to inform the development of an exhibit on animal minds that will address this issue and foster a deeper connection between people and animals. This two-part, sequential study of perceptions of animal thinking used qualitative interviews of visitors to the New York Hall of Science and Staten Island Zoo to develop a quantitative, online consumer survey of American museum visitors. The results show that American museum visitors vary in their perceptions of animal thinking, but appear to be open to new ideas about how animals might think. Participants' responses to the interviews revealed they could easily recognize survival strategies in wild animals, but had reservations about discussions of empathy, deception, and awareness. In addition, animals kept as pets or companion animals in Western culture were commonly perceived to have higher cognitive capacities for thinking than food or other domestic animals. Participants' responses to the online consumer survey appeared to focus on an overall concept of animal thinking, rather than different cognitive dimensions. Although participants were generally neutral in their responses, demographic analysis revealed participants who had dogs and/or cats, a college education, or watched nature shows were more likely to support the belief that animals can think. Participants who had children at home were less likely to support this belief. Further research is needed to determine how different kinds of thought processes are understood by general audiences and how demographic factors might influence perceptions of animal thinking.     

On the reciprocal interaction between believing and feeling: an adaptive agent modelling perspective

An agent’s beliefs usually depend on informational or cognitive factors such as observation or received communication or reasoning, but also affective factors may play a role. In this paper, by adopting neurological theories on the role of emotions and feelings, an agent model is introduced incorporating the interaction between cognitive and affective factors in believing. The model describes how the strength of a belief may not only depend on information obtained, but also on the emotional responses on the belief. For feeling emotions a recursive body loop between preparations for emotional responses and feelings is assumed. The model introduces a second feedback loop for the interaction between feeling and belief. The strength of a belief and of the feeling both result from the converging dynamic pattern modelled by the combination of the two loops. For some specific cases it is described, for example, how for certain personal characteristics an optimistic world view is generated in the agent’s beliefs, or, for other characteristics, a pessimistic world view. Moreover, the paper shows how such affective effects on beliefs can emerge and become stronger over time due to experiences obtained. It is shown how based on Hebbian learning a connection from feeling to belief can develop. As these connections affect the strenghts of future beliefs, in this way an effect of judgment ‘by experience built up in the past’ or ‘by gut feeling’ can be obtained. Some example simulation results and a mathematical analysis of the equilibria are presented.     

Synthesizing insight: artificial life as thought experimentation in biology

What is artificial life? Much has been said about this interesting collection of efforts to artificially simulate and synthesize lifelike behavior and processes, yet we are far from having a robust philosophical understanding of just what Alifers are doing and why it ought to interest philosophers of science, and philosophers of biology in particular. In this paper, I first provide three introductory examples from the particular subset of artificial life I focus on, known as ‘soft Alife’ (s-Alife), and follow up with a more in-depth review of the Avida program, which serves as my case study of s-Alife. Next, I review three well-known accounts of thought experiments, and then offer my own synthesized account, to make the argument that s-Alife functions as thought experimentation in biology. I draw a comparison between the methodology of the thought-experimental world that yields real-world results, and the s-Alife research that informs our understanding of natural life. I conclude that the insights provided by s-Alife research have the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding of the nature of organic life and thus deserve the attention of both philosophers and natural scientists.     

The challenge of challenge: Can problem solving opportunities enhance animal welfare?

Cognitive mechanisms are an important part of the organization of the behavior systems of animals. In the wild, animals regularly face problems that they must overcome in order to survive and thrive. Solving such problems often requires animals to process, store, retrieve, and act upon information from the environment—in other words, to use their cognitive skills. For example, animals may have to use navigational, tool-making or cooperative social skills in order to procure their food. However, many enrichment programs for captive animals do not include the integration of these types of cognitive challenges. Thus, foraging enrichments typically are designed to facilitate the physical expression of feeding behaviors such as food-searching and food consumption, but not to facilitate complex problem solving behaviors related to food acquisition. Challenging animals by presenting them with problems is almost certainly a source of frustration and stress. However, we suggest here that this is an important, and even necessary, feature of an enrichment program, as long as animals also possess the skills and resources to effectively solve the problems with which they are presented. We discuss this with reference to theories about the emotional consequences of coping with challenge, the association between lack of challenge and the development of abnormal behavior, and the benefits of stress (arousal) in facilitating learning and memory of relevant skills. Much remains to be done to provide empirical support for these theories. However, they do point the way to a practical approach to improving animal welfare—to design enrichments to facilitate the cognitive mechanisms which underlie the performance of complex behaviors that cannot be performed due to the restrictions inherent to the captive environment.     

Current directions in social cognitive neuroscience

Social cognitive neuroscience is an emerging discipline that seeks to explain the psychological and neural bases of socioemotional experience and behavior. Although research in some areas is already well developed (e.g. perception of nonverbal social cues) investigation in other areas has only just begun (e.g. social interaction). Current studies are elucidating; the role of the amygdala in a variety of evaluative and social judgment processes, the role of medial prefrontal cortex in mental state attribution, how frontally mediated controlled processes can regulate perception and experience, and the way in which these and other systems are recruited during social interaction. Future progress will depend upon the development of programmatic lines of research that integrate contemporary social cognitive research with cognitive neuroscience theory and methodology.     

Grist and mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning

Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).     

Review: From human–animal relation practice research to the development of the livestock farmer's activity: an ergonomics–applied ethology interaction

Animal husbandry and working conditions for livestock farmers have changed significantly in recent years as agriculture has been exposed to economic as well as health, environmental and ethical challenges. The idea of interdependent welfare between humans and animals is more relevant now than ever. Here, we innovatively bridge two disciplines—ergonomics and applied ethology—to achieve an in-depth observational understanding of real husbandry practice (by farmers, inseminators, vets) at work. Ergonomics aims to gain a detailed understanding of human activity in its physical, sensitive and cognitive dimensions in relation to a task. It also aims to transform work situations through a systemic approach drawing on multiple levers for change. Here, we examine how this analysis holds up to the inclusion of animals as an integral component of the livestock farmer’s work situation. Applied ethology studies behaviours in animals managed by humans. It aims to understand how these animals perceive their environment, including how they construct their relationship with the livestock farmer. This paper proposes an original conception of the human–animal relationship in animal husbandry that employs core structural concepts from both disciplines. From an ergonomic point of view, we address the human–animal relations by examining the relationship between ‘prescribed’ and real work practices, between work and personal life situation, between professional task and human activity. On the applied ethology side of the equation, the human–animal relationship is a process built through communication and regular interactions between two ‘partners’ who know each other. The goal is to understand how each partner perceives the other according to their multimodal sensory world and their cognitive and emotional capacities, and to predict the outcome of future interactions. We cross-analyse these scientific views to show, based on examples, how and in what way they can intersect to bring better analysis of these human–animal relationships. We reflect on common working hypotheses and situated observational approaches based on indicators (behaviour and animal and human welfare/health). This analysis prompts us to clarify what human–animal relational practice means in animal husbandry work, i.e. a strategy employed by the livestock farmer to work safely and efficiently in a healthy environment, where the animal is treated as a partner in the relationship. In this perspective, the challenge is for the livestock farmer’s activity to co-build a positive relationship and avoid being subject to this one.     

社会认知神经科学的取向与研究进展

社会认知神经科学是社会心理学和认知神经科学相结合的新兴多学科研究领域,其强调在社会、认知与脑神经等三个层面的交互作用上去理解心理现象。前几年主要是对刻板印象、态度与态度改变、他人知觉、自我认知以及情绪与认知交互作用等方面进行了深入研究,其主要范式是应用认知神经科学的方法来验证社会心理学在这些范围内上的各种不同的理论观点,当前的研究主要集中在知觉和再认的社会标记、社会判断和归因、评价调节知觉和经验以及社会交互作用等传统的社会心理学方面,并取得了突破性进展。展望未来的研究,其将在系统准则研究发展的基础上,把当今的社会认知研究与认知神经科学在理论和方法论上整合起来,为揭示人类高级社会心理现象的神经基础,开辟一条崭新的研究道路。     

Executive decision-making in the domestic sheep

Two new large animal models of Huntington's disease (HD) have been developed recently, an old world monkey (macaque) and a sheep. Macaques, with their large brains and complex repertoire of behaviors are the 'gold-standard' laboratory animals for testing cognitive function, but there are many practical and ethical issues that must be resolved before HD macaques can be used for pre-clinical research. By contrast, despite their comparable brain size, sheep do not enjoy a reputation for intelligence, and are not used for pre-clinical cognitive testing. Given that cognitive decline is a major therapeutic target in HD, the feasibility of testing cognitive function in sheep must be explored if they are to be considered seriously as models of HD. Here we tested the ability of sheep to perform tests of executive function (discrimination learning, reversal learning and attentional set-shifting). Significantly, we found that not only could sheep perform discrimination learning and reversals, but they could also perform the intradimensional (ID) and extradimensional (ED) set-shifting tasks that are sensitive tests of cognitive dysfunction in humans. Their performance on the ID/ED shifts mirrored that seen in humans and macaques, with significantly more errors to reach criterion in the ED than the ID shift. Thus, sheep can perform 'executive' cognitive tasks that are an important part of the primate behavioral repertoire, but which have never been shown previously to exist in any other large animal. Sheep have great potential, not only for use as a large animal model of HD, but also for studying cognitive function and the evolution of complex behaviours in normal animals.     

Living krill,zooplankton and experimental investigations: a discourse on the role of krill and their experimental study in marine ecology

Krill occupy critical positions in a many marine ecosystems and have been the subject of a number of concerted studies yet there are large areas of their biology that still remain a mystery. Most species of krill are open ocean animals, which makes direct observation and sampling difficult. Krill also exhibit a number of physiological and behavioural attributes which frustrate attempts to understand their life history. Krill are conceptually difficult to come to terms with; they are obviously different from larger marine organisms such as squid, fish, whales and fish yet they are also quite distinct from those animals classed as zooplankton such as copepods. Despite these differences they have most often been grouped with zooplankton and have been studied using techniques developed for animals which are orders of magnitude smaller than they. This mismatch has affected our view of their interactions with the physical world and also affects their perceived trophic interactions. Their size and mobility also interferes with our ability to sample them effectively and thus to develop our appreciation of their true role in the marine ecosystem. Understanding how intermediate-sized animals, such as krill, function in aquatic ecosystem is critical to better management of the marine environment.     

The psychology of primate cooperation and competition: a call for realigning research agendas

Cooperation and competition are two key components of social life. Current research agendas investigating the psychological underpinnings of competition and cooperation in non-human primates are misaligned. The majority of work on competition has been done in the context of theory of mind and deception, while work on cooperation has mostly focused on collaboration and helping. The current impression that theory of mind is not necessarily implicated in cooperative activities and that helping could not be an integral part of competition might therefore be rather misleading. Furthermore, theory of mind research has mainly focused on cognitive aspects like the type of stimuli controlling responses, the nature of representation and how those representations are acquired, while collaboration and helping have focused primarily on motivational aspects like prosociality, common goals and a sense of justice and other-regarding concerns. We present the current state of these two bodies of research paying special attention to how they have developed and diverged over the years. We propose potential directions to realign the research agendas to investigate the psychological underpinnings of cooperation and competition in primates and other animals.     

Living krill, zooplankton and experimental investigations: a discourse on the role of krill and their experimental study in marine ecology

Krill occupy critical positions in a many marine ecosystems and have been the subject of a number of concerted studies yet there are large areas of their biology that still remain a mystery. Most species of krill are open ocean animals, which makes direct observation and sampling difficult. Krill also exhibit a number of physiological and behavioural attributes which frustrate attempts to understand their life history. Krill are conceptually difficult to come to terms with; they are obviously different from larger marine organisms such as squid, fish, whales and fish yet they are also quite distinct from those animals classed as zooplankton such as copepods. Despite these differences they have most often been grouped with zooplankton and have been studied using techniques developed for animals which are orders of magnitude smaller than they. This mismatch has affected our view of their interactions with the physical world and also affects their perceived trophic interactions. Their size and mobility also interferes with our ability to sample them effectively and thus to develop our appreciation of their true role in the marine ecosystem. Understanding how intermediate-sized animals, such as krill, function in aquatic ecosystem is critical to better management of the marine environment.     

Ecological frames of mind: the role of cognition in behavioral ecology.

Cognitive psychology is the study of how information, from the senses and from memory, is used in the production of behavior. Investigation of the specifics of behavioral adaptation has already led some behavioral ecologists into the domain of animal cognition. I make several arguments for the benefits and the necessity of a sophisticated assessment by ecologists of the cognitive aspects of behavioral adaptation. First, because cognition typically serves to produce adaptive behavior, cognitive structure and function should reflect ecological demands; studies of cognition in ecological contexts are opportunities to understand adaptation. Furthermore, constraints on cognitive properties may help determine how behavior meets the environment. Studies of spatial memory in food-caching corvids exemplify how cognitive aspects of behavior may both reflect and determine specifics of adaptation. Second, many models in behavioral ecology assume certain cognitive abilities, such as timing or counting. Cognitive theory and methodology should be used to determine whether animals possess these abilities. I have provided examples. Third, consideration of cognitive function can lead to original ideas about the details of behavioral adaptation. Without a thorough integration of cognitive psychology with behavioral ecology, our understanding of the relation between behavior and selective pressures will be compromised.     

Relations of homology between higher cognitive emotions and basic emotions

In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is that of ‘homology’ (similarity due to common descent) rather than ‘analogy’, or ‘shared function’, and that psychological traits are a special case of biological traits, they maintain that psychological categories should be individuated primarily by relations of homology rather than in terms of shared function. This poses a direct challenge to the dominant philosophical view of how to define psychological categories, viz., ‘functionalism’. Although the implications of this position extend to all psychological traits, the debate has centered around ‘emotion’ as an example of a psychological category ripe for reinterpretation within this new framework of classification. I address arguments by Griffiths that emotions should be divided into at least two distinct classes, basic emotions and higher cognitive emotions, and that these two classes require radically different theories to explain them. Griffiths argues that while basic emotions in humans are homologous to the corresponding states in other animals, higher cognitive emotions are dependent on mental capacities unique to humans, and are therefore not homologous to basic emotions. Using the example of shame, I argue that (a) many emotions that are commonly classified as being higher cognitive emotions actually correspond to certain basic emotions, and that (b) the “higher cognitive forms” of these emotions are best seen as being homologous to their basic forms.     

Social conflict models: can they inform us about human psychopathology?

Social conflict models have been proposed as a powerful way to investigate basic questions of how brain and behavior are altered by social experience. Social defeat, in particular, appears to be a major stressor for most species, and in humans, this stressor is thought to play an important role in the onset of a variety of psychiatric disorders including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Aggressive experience, on the other hand, may promote disorders involving inappropriate aggression and violence. Current research using animal models of social conflict involves multiple levels of analysis from genetic and molecular to systems and overt behavior. This review briefly examines a variety of these animal models of social conflict in order to assess whether they are useful for advancing our understanding of how experience can shape brain and behavior and for translating this information so that we have the potential to improve the quality of life of individuals with mental illness and behavioral disorders.     

Toward a cross-species neuroscientific understanding of the affective mind: do animals have emotional feelings?

Do we need to consider mental processes in our analysis of brain functions in other animals? Obviously we do, if such BrainMind functions exist in the animals we wish to understand. If so, how do we proceed, while still retaining materialistic-mechanistic perspectives? This essay outlines the historical forces that led to emotional feelings in animals being marginalized in behavioristic scientific discussions of why animals behave the way they do, and why mental constructs are generally disregarded in modern neuroscientific analyses. The roots of this problem go back to Cartesian dualism and the attempt of 19th century physician-scientists to ground a new type of medical curriculum on a completely materialistic approach to body functions. Thereby all vitalistic principles were discarded from the lexicon of science, and subjective experience in animals was put in that category and discarded as an invalid approach to animal behavior. This led to forms of rigid operationalism during the era of behaviorism and subsequently ruthless reductionism in brain research, leaving little room for mentalistic concepts such as emotional feelings in animal research. However, modern studies of the brain clearly indicate that artificially induced arousals of emotional networks, as with localized electrical and chemical brain stimulation, can serve as "rewards" and "punishments" in various learning tasks. This strongly indicates that animal brains elaborate various experienced states, with those having affective contents being easiest to study rigorously. However, in approaching emotional feelings empirically we must pay special attention to the difficulties and vagaries of human language and evolutionary levels of control in the brain. We need distinct nomenclatures from primary (unconditioned phenomenal experiences) to tertiary (reflective) levels of mind. The scientific pursuit of affective brain processes in other mammals can now reveal general BrainMind principles that also apply to human feelings, as with neurochemical predictions from preclinical animal models to self-reports of corresponding human experiences. In short, brain research has now repeatedly verified the existence of affective experience-various reward and punishment functions-during artificial arousal of emotional networks in our fellow animals. The implications for new conceptual schema for understanding human/primate affective feelings and how such knowledge can impact scientific advances in biological psychiatry are also addressed.