Animal Intelligence / Animal Cognition

I was listening to a Moth Podcast of Irene Pepperberg telling the story of her 20-odd years of research with her parrot named Alex. Among other things, she told some incredible anecdotes about the ways in which Alex totally surprised them in what he was able to put together on his own, including offering a phonic spelling of "N-U-T" before they actually taught him letters in order to express his desire for a nut. Anyway, Irene Pepperberg and Alex had a lot of coverage in the popular press and have several books out, so I feel like they themselves (Alex actually died) felt too close to the circus or sideshow thing at times . . . The point is, the story got me really excited about animal cognition research. :)

I began where most things begin--with a perusal of a Wikipedia page on the topic. I read the Wikipedia: Animal Cognition article, which turned out to be incredibly exciting and gave me a whole list of other things to look into. I wrote down a few quotes from the article, though, because some of which are just great as they are.

For instance, the mirror test: might be a fascinating thing to do with an artwork too . . .

"The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Gordon G. Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behavior towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for other great apes, the European Magpie,[7] some cetaceans and a solitary elephant, but not for monkeys. The mirror test has attracted controversy among some researchers because it is entirely focused on vision, the primary sense in humans, while other species rely more heavily on other senses such as the olfactory sense in dogs.[citation needed]"

"Some animals, including great apes, crows, dolphins, dogs, elephants, cats, pigs, rats, and parrots are still typically thought by laypeople as intelligent in ways that some other species of animal are not. For example, crows are attributed with human-like intelligence in the folklore of many cultures. A number of recent survey studies have demonstrated the consistency of these rankings between people in a given culture and indeed to a considerable extent across cultures.[16]"

This short note here sounds really promising to me. What if I do portraits or pieces of species representatives of each of these typically-thought-by-laypeople-as-intelligent animals? It gives purpose to the series of animals I choose.

"One question that can be asked coherently is how far different species are intelligent in the same ways as humans are, i.e., are their cognitive processes similar to ours. Not surprisingly, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to do best on such an assessment. Among the birds, corvids and parrots have typically been found to perform well."

"Young chimpanzees have outperformed human college students in tasks requiring remembering numbers." That is SO GREAT.

Anyway, the Wikipedia article led me to look up some further examples of successful (and unsuccessful) attempts of training or teaching animals, especially this great story of Washoe the Chimpanzee, who learned sign-language. Apparently, she could reliably use 250 different signs, showed ability to combine signs in novel and meaningful ways, and did so best when she learned without external/classical-conditioning sort of motivation (rewards) though that's how they started teaching her. I LOVE the way these learning sessions were described.

"Washoe then tended to bring her arms together again, at which point the Gardners would reward her with more tickling. Over time, the Gardners required Washoe to be more precise with her arm and hand movements in order to elicit more tickling."

"In addition, they stopped the tickle rewards during instruction because these generally resulted in laughing breakdowns."

This relates really nicely with a TED Talk: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes. She shows some AMAZING video of Bonobos learning things like making and putting out fires (which is really great given the whole "man is human because he can make fire" or something) but also how they have learned various communication skills like the comprehension of conversational English and the ability to draw pictograms/symbols (SYMBOLS!) that represent words or ideas. !! Ok, so there is a lot there to look at, but one thing she, or maybe Jane Goodall because I can't remember where I actually heard this, or maybe just in another Wikipedia article, they were saying that one reason why some of the language acquisition experiments didn't replicate well was because teaching language through classical conditioning is not an effective way of learning languages, and that it has been found that chimps/apes etc. learn languages far more effectively when they simply WANT to be able to communicate with individuals in their lives and learn through mimicry and a desire to participate. If that made sense. That seems to be the method Savage-Rimbaugh has taken, and the results are astounding.

This whole idea of animal cognition is fascinating, because it seems both really threatening to human's status as somehow separate or suprerior to other creatures, ut also really endearing and reassuring to know we are not alone. . . that there are billions more thinking and feeling living things on this planet than we perhaps previously gave credit to. it offers to demonstrate so much about what DOES make us human, then, or what factors have pushed us to develop in the strange and complex way that we have.

Jacob did point out during a discussion of all of this that perhaps the science is not as straightforward as it appears, and it is hard to really prove or quantify the kinds of progress in animal intelligence that is being posited. (Neither of us could figure out how they could reliably prove that pigeons out-perform humans on the Monty-Hall probability problem that quite intelligent humans notoriously get wrong or do not even comprehend.) A few days before, Jacob and I also had a discussion about whether or not animals other than humans can be said to commit suicide. According to Katie Gordon, their resident suicide researcher, humans are the only animals that take their own lives. But certainly you hear plenty of anecdotes of animals that, some more actively than others, find ways to stop living. The question of how conscious this decision is has real implications for the consciousness of animals (even though there are some who would argue that proving consciousness in humans is still pretty tricky.) I was reminded very recently of the documentary "The Cove" about dolphins in which the former dolphin trainer claims that one of the dolphins that played Flipper just swam into his arms and purposefully stopped breathing (since breathing is a conscious decision for dolphins) and therefore killed herself out of depression. Questions of these dividing lines - "Humans are the only animals that . . . " kill themselves, draw, have complex language, have sex for fun, kill each other for reasons other than food, use tools, etc. (all of which, I think, can be strongly undermined) is really interesting. I mean, I think our attempts to delineate our own uniqueness is a fascinating compulsion. It also seems really vital if we are to keep existing in the same kind of relationship to animals as we currently have (a system of "dominion" over the animals, right to eat them, own them, put them in zoos, etc.)

So much for now.