Cognition: Human vs Non-human Animal

Here are some questions and answers to start off this thread ...

============================
Question:
What part of cognition is the same with reference to humans vs animals?

Answer:
The four perceptual powers of awareness:

(1) sense-perception
(2) memory
(3) imagination
(4) crude association
------------------------------------------
Question:
What part of cognition is different with reference to humans vs animals?

Answer:
The conceptual power of awareness.
============================

That's a start. Some may already disagree. This thread is for posting both the evidence and the reasoning in support of the potential answers to these two questions.

Ed

Post 1

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 7:26pm

Given a proper scientific explanation, I might be easily disabused of the notion, but I'm inclined to place 3) imagination and 4) crude association under the category of conceptual powers.

Ed?

jt
(Edited by Jay Abbott on 9/24, 7:27pm)

Post 2

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 5:15am

1. Through the evolutionary tree all four of those vary greatly.

Bacteria, Fungus, Insects, Worms, Fish, Frogs, Reptiles, Birds, Mammals... even when comparing between mammals. Think: sight, sound, scent, taste, temperature, vibration, pressure. We all have very different sensory capabilities. Sensory neurons capture things like light intensities, pressure changes, etc and convert them into firing rates.

Memory: We all have very different long term memory storage capacities, and different rates that we can store new information to long term memory. Compare a fish to a human! To store information in long term memory, a neuron changes the chemicals at an input where it receives voltage spikes from another neuron, so that the firing of this neuron is influenced similarly over time by the firing rate of the other neuron.

Imagination: hard to measure, but I'm sure there are studies showing that babies will try more combinations of things to solve a problem than even the most intelligent non-human primates. The mental operation of imagination is simply a modification of some information/an idea, such as changing a numeric value from 1 to 5.

Crude association: You mean pattern recognition? Humans beat non-human primates at finding patterns in number sequences... Yea we are different in this capacity too. Pattern recognition requires you imagine different patterns and compare your imagined pattern to what you are sensing/trying to match.

2. Awareness of what? And awareness meaning what? Meaning having information in short term memory (actively thinking memory?) Capacity, as in how much information one can fit in short term memory? Awareness of sensory information? Awareness of past events? Awareness of imagined states and events? Awareness of relationships between things?

Yea, I think various organisms do have different limits in short term memory (awareness). This varies by neural cell count and the number of different neural firing rates that neural cells can differentiate between (kind of like how many letters are in the neuron-neuron communication alphabet). And we also vary in what we are thinking about (vary in what we are aware of). Short term memory is the collection of information represented by all of an organism's current neural firing rates.

Post 3

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 7:17am

Jay,

On Imagination

Our perceptual powers of awareness are subjective in the sense that they are sensitive (rather than intellectual) faculties. This does not mean that truths which can be discovered from our sensitive faculties are necessarily subjective. We can (must) mix our intellectual faculties with our sensitive ones in order to get to objective and necessary truths of the world. It's like Locke's theory of homesteading land, you have to mix your (intelligent) labor with the provided, or the given, material.

When things flash before our imagination, that's purely our sensation of images. When a science fiction writer imagines the plot of a new novel, that's mixing the intellect with the sensations imagined.

On Crude Association

This is a Pavlov phenomenon, which is also found in some schizophrenic humans. There's no good reason to salivate at the sound of a bell -- unless a scientist has been training you for awhile to expect food. There's no logical association of bell ringing and food bringing. It's simply an association that someone or something may have arrived at via purely subjective experience. After a dog gets beaten by a man in a uniform, then he'll bark at all men in uniform after that. It's simply thoughtless rote memorization.

Do you find these answers satisfactory, or do you have more questions?

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 9/25, 9:30pm)

Post 4

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 7:25am

Dean, great points about species-specific differences.

Crude association: You mean pattern recognition?

I mean difference recognition -- the recognition that something is either different or makes for a difference (as when a dog recognizes the different outcome of sitting vs not sitting when its master commands it to sit).

There doesn't have to be any hint of logic in the association, just a simple and direct experience or expectation. When a schizophrenic hears the telephone ring at the exact time that they had accidentally cut their finger chopping vegetables -- they will unplug the telephone every time they chop vegetables again.

That's crude association.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 9/25, 7:28am)

Post 5

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:06am

Fish-Monkeys

They say a fish has only five seconds worth of memory:

====================
-here now food
-here now food
-here now food
-HERE NOW PREDATOR!

[several seconds of frantic swiming]

...
-here now food
-here now food
-HERE NOW (NEW) PREDATOR! [actually, it's the same predator]

[several seconds of frantic swiming]

...
-[repeat]
====================

Here's an investigation of naturally-amnesic monkeys (the capuchin monkey):

===================
Anim Cogn. 2008 Aug 20.

An assessment of memory awareness in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella).

Basile BM, Hampton RR, Suomi SJ, Murray EA.

National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA, bbasile@emory.edu.

Humans, apes, and rhesus monkeys demonstrate memory awareness by collecting information when ignorant and acting immediately when informed. In this study, five capuchin monkeys searched for food after either watching the experimenter bait one of four opaque tubes (seen trials), or not watching (unseen trials). Monkeys with memory awareness should look into the tubes before making a selection only on unseen trials because on seen trials they already know the location of the food.

In Experiment 1, one of the five capuchins looked significantly more often on unseen trials. In Experiment 2, we ensured that the monkeys attended to the baiting by interleaving training and test sessions. Three of the five monkeys looked more often on unseen trials. Because monkeys looked more often than not on both trial types, potentially creating a ceiling effect, we increased the effort required to look in Experiment 3, and predicted a larger difference in the probability of looking between seen and unseen trials. None of the five monkeys looked more often on unseen trials.

These findings provide equivocal evidence for memory awareness in capuchin monkeys using tests that have yielded clear evidence in humans, apes, and rhesus monkeys.
=======================

Recap:
Four out of five monkeys surveyed [Experiment 1] wasted time looking for food in four different containers after they saw an experimenter put the food in just one of the four containers! Even on repeated trials [Experiment 2] -- where repetition was implemented to try to train the monkeys with rote memorization -- only three of five monkeys got it!

Explanation:
These dumb monkeys made the crude association of food with containers. You could have put any kind of container in front of them -- and they'd think there's food in it. Why? Because they once saw an experimenter put some food into a container! Experiment 3 shows that if you increase the selective pressure to remember, the monkeys didn't respond by remembering better (they didn't look around less after seeing the container that the food was put into).

I'd say that their error was in over-association -- i.e., an association so crude that it even overrode their own memory of preceding events!

Ed

Post 6

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:28am

Categorization in Great Apes

Great apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobo chimpanzees) categorize things. Some might conject that that means they undergo concept-formation. In order to show that, however, the categorizations performed couldn't be purely perceptual in nature. Here's some "proof of the negative" (for what that's worth) that conceptual powers aren't used by great apes:

=====================
Anim Cogn. 2008 Oct;11(4):569-85.

The use of perceptual features in categorization by orangutans (Pongo abelli).

Marsh HL, Macdonald SE.

Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada.

The extent to which categorization of natural classes in animals reflects a generalization based on perceptual similarity versus an abstract conceptual representation remains unclear. Here, two experiments were conducted to identify the perceptual features used by orangutans when categorizing pictures.

In Experiment 1, subjects were trained and tested for transfer on a concrete discrimination (gorillas or orangutans vs. other primates). Analysis of performance on both positive and negative exemplars revealed that performance was best on photos with faces, particularly close-ups. Moreover, error trials did not seem to reflect instances of mistaken identity, but rather, exemplars that may have been distracting for other reasons, such as novel coloration or morphology.

In Experiment 2, photos were modified to test the effects of various features. Color modifications caused the biggest decrease in performance, and eye modifications also affected performance deleteriously. Therefore, two perceptual features, namely eye regions and color, played a key role in subjects' ability to categorize.

However, performance based on an underlying concept cannot be ruled out, because both of these features are highly relevant in terms of defining category membership.
=========================
Recap:
Orangutans erred in their categorizations of photos (of other apes) when perceptually distracted by non-essentials like color. Change a gorilla from (normal) black to white -- and they don't know what they are looking at anymore. Or, more exactly, the accumulated evidence failed to suggest that orangutans know that a white gorilla is, indeed, a gorilla.

The evidence indicates a purely perceptual (read: non-conceptual) process of categorization.

Ed

Post 7

Sunday, September 28, 2008 - 8:19pm

More evidence:

===============================
Anim Cogn. 2008 Jul;11(3):423-30.

Tubes, tables and traps: great apes solve two functionally equivalent trap tasks but show no evidence of transfer across tasks.

Martin-Ordas G, Call J, Colmenares F.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany. ordas@eva.mpg.de

Previous studies on tool using have shown that presenting subjects with certain modifications in the experimental setup can substantially improve their performance. However, procedural modifications (e.g. trap table task) may not only remove task constraints but also simplify the problem conceptually. The goal of this study was to design a variation of the trap-table that was functionally equivalent to the trap-tube task.

In this new task, the subjects had to decide where to insert the tool and in which direction the reward should be pushed. We also administered a trap-tube task that allowed animals to push or rake the reward with the tool to compare the subjects' performance on both tasks. We used a larger sample of subjects than in previous studies and from all the four species of great apes (Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus, and Pongo pygmaeus).

The results showed that apes performed better in the trap-platform task than in the trap-tube task. Subjects solved the tube task faster than in previous studies and they also preferred to rake in rather than to push the reward out. There was no correlation in the level of performance between both tasks, and no indication of interspecies differences.

These data are consistent with the idea that apes may possess some specific causal knowledge of traps but may lack the ability to establish analogical relations between functional equivalent tasks.
===============================

Recap:
If you put a food reward out of reach of a Great Ape (gorilla, chimp, orangutan), but you provide them a tool by which they can reach the food through a tube or a trap -- something which prevents them from merely reaching for the food with their arm -- then they'll figure out how to use the provided tool in order to push the food to where they can get at it with their hands.

However, getting good at one task doesn't transfer to being good at other tasks which have analogical similarity -- tasks which are only meaninglessly different, or functionally-equivalent, tasks.

In other words, there isn't any evidence that apes use a mental abstraction (of what's important for them to do in one task) -- in order to apply the abstracted knowledge to the new, but still functionally equivalent, task.

Ed

Post 8

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 12:17pm

Hi Ed,

Thanks for this thread. Let's work with this example in regard to concept-formation.

After a dog gets beaten by a man in a uniform, then he'll bark at all men in uniform after that. It's simply thoughtless rote memorization.

This is more than crude, Pavlovian association. Crude association would just be the dog associating a particular man or particular uniform with getting beaten. If, however, the dog generalizes the association by responding to a kind of person (male) or kind of outfit (uniform), then that would indicate concept-formation, a process of separating out some particulars that share some common features. Generalizing associations is not associating; it is concept making. The dog's process is undoubtedly far from deliberate. Maybe that's what you meant by "thoughtless." It formed the concept by accident, and perhaps accidental concept formation is as far as doggy can do.

I'm not sure what to make of your 4 categories of perceptual awareness. Surely they all deal with percepts, but I'm not sure how direct or automatic they are -- qualities that perception requires.

Specifically, I think crude association and sense-perception are fair to categorize as perceptual since they are automatic and direct. But memory and imagination both seem, at times, indirect and non-automatic. Imagination is a process of mentally combining and re-combining percepts of which one is not directly aware. This seems to be a higher process than perception. It becomes automatic at least in a dreaming state, but let's leave that be. Memory is a little different. Some memory is direct and automatic, like recognition of percepts that are immediately present to one's sense-perception. But some memory is not direct or automatic, like recalling past information that is not immediately present.

Jordan

Post 9

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 1:07pm

Jordan,

You said, "This is more than crude, Pavlovian association. Crude association would just be the dog associating a particular man or particular uniform with getting beaten. If, however, the dog generalizes the association by responding to a kind of person (male) or kind of outfit (uniform), then that would indicate concept-formation, a process of separating out some particulars that share some common features. Generalizing associations is not associating; it is concept making. The dog's process is undoubtedly far from deliberate. Maybe that's what you meant by "thoughtless." It formed the concept by accident, and perhaps accidental concept formation is as far as doggy can do."

I had a parrot that used to freak out if it saw me holding a dark colored sock - as if it was looking at a snake. But a lighter color sock didn't register - no panic. I saw this as yes-no response and it wasn't a range of colors, but a color beyond a specific point in the spectrum.

I could see the same thing with the dogs and the uniforms and with the gender. We are the ones that note the possibility of generalization on uniforms, but for the dog it might be any all the same color for top and bottom that is darker than x (or lighter than x). It could be indistinguishable within that range and therefore, for the dog - a concrete. With gender, it is even more likely to fit that since dogs use smell to distinguish and gender probably smells the same - hence another concrete for the dog to hang the response on. No need for the dog to generalize in this case.

A pitcher has a winning game and decides to wear the same socks for the rest of the season, as if they were the cause of the win. That's more stupid that my parrot - and more a misuse of his rational capacity and ability to generalize, but similar in locking on a concrete to associate with an emotionally charged situation. The pitcher had to generalize to sustain his concept of luck, but I don't think the dog had to generalize anywhere.

Post 10

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 6:26pm

Hi Steve,

If the parrot responds to a specific color range, irrespective of which objects bears that color, then that indicates that the parrot has formed a concept: the parrot has lumped all objects of this particular color range into one category, omitting the particular attributes of each object, and separating out all objects that fall outside this color range.

Same goes for the dog allegedly distinguishing sex based on smell. If the dog isolates a specific smell, irrespective of the individual who stinks of it, and if the dog excludes all other smells, then the dog has formed a concept. Each instance of the smell is of course perceptual and concrete, but categorizing these smells transcends that perceptual and concrete level.

Lastly, the pitcher formed a concept not of luck but of "stuff that makes me win," and in that concept he placed "wearing same socks." It is an ill-formed concept based on superstition, but like the parrot's color range and the dog's threatening odor category, the pitcher's "winning stuff" is a concept, nonetheless.

Jordan

Post 11

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 7:29pm

Jordan,

I agree with you on the pitcher (I said it was a bad concept when I described it).

I don't agree with you on the parrot or on the dog. If I were to see you on a bad hair day when you are frowning and wearing wrinkly clothes, then I see you on a good day, wearing nice clothes, maybe with a tan and sun glasses - it's still you - that's not a concept, just minor sensory differences that are resolved at the percept level. Then, with the parrot and the dog, the resolved percept is associated with an emotional response.

Post 12

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 8:41pm

Jordan,

In post 6, I excerpted a scientific investigation into ape categorization which was aimed at answering the question of whether apes use concepts. The specific hypothesis to be tested -- the research question to explore -- was outline in the first sentence as a dichotomy of:

... generalization based on perceptual similarity versus an abstract conceptual representation ...

They are saying that perceptual generalization is not an instance of concept-formation. That would make perceptual generalizations mere perceptual associations. Yet when you bring up animal examples -- they're all perceptual associations, and you seem to be saying that that results in concepts.

Do you disagree with those researchers? Do you disagree with the way I re-worded your position?

Ed

Post 13

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 12:05pm

Steve,

If you can mentally isolate me as an object, despite variation in my appearance, then you have formed only a percept, not a concept, because I am a single, concrete object, and not just a member of the category JORDAN.

Regardless of whether the dog's and parrot's response is emotional, they are responses not to mere concretes, but to conretes as members of specific categories.

Ed,

It would've helped at the researcher's defined their terms, but I think Objectivism rejects the researchers' notion that "perceptual generalization" is not an instance of "abstract concept formation." So long as the subject can mentally isolate some objects from others based on some shared trait, the subject has engaged in concept formation, even of the objects being isolated out are just percepts.

And I disagree that "perceptual generalization" is that same as "perceptual association." The latter pertains to linking objects and events to one another, not with categorizing them. Some association might well be associating a category with an event, which of course would presuppose the category.

Not that it matters much, but to be sure, the apes experiment you mentioned dealt with facial recognition, not abstract concept formation. The experiment's design shows what facial features are essential in those apes' ability to identify faces of their species, not whether those apes have a concept of their species. It actually had to be assumed, for purposes of the experiment, that apes had a concept of their species based on the common traits of each member's face.

Jordan

Post 14

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 12:24pm

Jordan,

Tell me how you know that my parrot was 'thinking,' "Run, it's a snake!" as opposed to, "Run, it's the snake!"

Post 15

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 1:55pm

Biting retort, Steve.

Ed
[no pun intended]

Post 16

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 2:30pm

Jordan,

Regarding the 2008 Marsh and MacDonald study on orangutan concept-formation, I was able to view the first page of it here. Here is a partial quote of the Introduction with a caveat -- I am not sure I spelled authors' names correctly (due to the poor visual quality of the .pdf of this first page):

The use of perceptual features in categorization by orangutans (Pongo abelli). When encountering a new object in one's surroundings, the ability to recognize the item as a member of a known category, such as a potential food item or predator, can be crucial for survival. It has been well documented empirically that many animals possess this ability.

Since the landmark study by Herrnstein and Loveland (1964), in which pigeons discriminated between slides containing humans and those without, pigeons and primates have been trained to categorize many natural classes of objects, from trees and water to other animal species (e.g., Herrnstein et al. 1976; D' Amato and Van Sant 1988; Roberts and Mazmanian 1988; Brown and Boysen 2000; Tanaka 2001).

They have also successfully classified objects that would have no evolutionary significance to them, such as "cars" and "chairs" (Bhadl et al. 1988), ruling out the possibility that categorization is based on innate concepts. In these studies, subjects seem to perform as if they have attained concepts, sorting even novel pictures correctly. Because of this, some researchers have claimed that animals exhibit concept learning (Herrnstein and Loveland 1964). However, the extent to which categorization is actually a manifestation of an internal representation remains unclear.

The problem is that it is very difficult to use empirical methods to parse out the critical juncture between open-ended categorization based only on the presence of perceptual features versus that based on an internal concept. This is because both processes rely on physical similarity (D' Amato and Van Sant 1988).

Recap:
According to Marsh and MacDonald, concepts are more than merely open-ended categorizations based on perceptual features. To put that in my words now, I'd call that generalizing based on some crudely (non-logically) associated perceptual features.

Do you disagree with them? Do you disagree with me?

Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 10/01, 2:31pm)

Post 17

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 2:44pm

Jordan,

Here is Rand talking about some humans ("anti-conceptual mentality") who have adopted the kind of animal epistemology to which I refer when I say crude association, or generalization based on crudely associated perceptual features:

In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point�i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required.

From:
"Age of Envy", Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p 39

If you don't use logic to integrate knowledge, then you're not actually forming concepts (which require that) -- you're accumulating coalesced globs of subjective experiences.

Ed

Post 18

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 3:15pm

Hi Ed,

Concept-formation just requires differentiation and integration, which might well entail logic, but which by themselves do not ensure *good* concept-formation.

The anti-conceptual humans exemplify *bad* concept-formation, and their lousy process differs significantly from an animal's epistemology. Anti-conceptual humans are riddled with artificial, unnecessary, random, and unusable file folders. Animals on the other hand tend to form file folders on an as-needed, non-random, fairly necessary and usable basis. They, for the most part, have good, but severely limited, concept-formation.

Jordan

Post 19

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - 6:21pm