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"Povinelli, Daniel J"
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Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds
Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.
Journal Article
On the lack of evidence that non-human animals possess anything remotely resembling a ‘theory of mind’
After decades of effort by some of our brightest human and non-human minds, there is still little consensus on whether or not non-human animals understand anything about the unobservable mental states of other animals or even what it would mean for a non-verbal animal to understand the concept of a 'mental state'. In the present paper, we confront four related and contentious questions head-on: (i) What exactly would it mean for a non-verbal organism to have an 'understanding' or a 'representation' of another animal's mental state? (ii) What should (and should not) count as compelling empirical evidence that a non-verbal cognitive agent has a system for understanding or forming representations about mental states in a functionally adaptive manner? (iii) Why have the kind of experimental protocols that are currently in vogue failed to produce compelling evidence that non-human animals possess anything even remotely resembling a theory of mind? (iv) What kind of experiments could, at least in principle, provide compelling evidence for such a system in a non-verbal organism?
Journal Article
Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members
Law of the jungle
There is plenty of evidence — some of it cited in this week's Review Article — that humans care about the welfare of others and will provide costly assistance even to strangers. Frans de Waal has argued that ’other-regarding sentiments’ may be deep-rooted in primate evolutionary history. But a test for such behaviour in chimpanzees has drawn a blank. They spurn the chance to deliver benefits to unrelated but familiar individuals at no cost to themselves, cooperating only with their kin and partners.
Humans are an unusually prosocial species—we vote, give blood, recycle, give tithes and punish violators of social norms. Experimental evidence indicates that people willingly incur costs to help strangers in anonymous one-shot interactions
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,
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, and that altruistic behaviour is motivated, at least in part, by empathy and concern for the welfare of others (hereafter referred to as other-regarding preferences)
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. In contrast, cooperative behaviour in non-human primates is mainly limited to kin and reciprocating partners, and is virtually never extended to unfamiliar individuals
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. Here we present experimental tests of the existence of other-regarding preferences in non-human primates, and show that chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes
) do not take advantage of opportunities to deliver benefits to familiar individuals at no material cost to themselves, suggesting that chimpanzee behaviour is not motivated by other-regarding preferences. Chimpanzees are among the primates most likely to demonstrate prosocial behaviours. They participate in a variety of collective activities, including territorial patrols, coalitionary aggression, cooperative hunting, food sharing and joint mate guarding
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,
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,
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,
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. Consolation of victims of aggression
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and anecdotal accounts of solicitous treatment of injured individuals suggest that chimpanzees may feel empathy
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,
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. Chimpanzees sometimes reject exchanges in which they receive less valuable rewards than others, which may be one element of a ‘sense of fairness’, but there is no evidence that they are averse to interactions in which they benefit more than others
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.
Journal Article
The Aesop's Fable Paradigm
The Aesop's Fable Paradigm is a collection of essays
that explore the cutting-edge intersection of Folklore and Science.
From moralizing fables to fantastic folktales, humans have been
telling stories about animals-animals who can talk, feel, think,
and make moral judgments just as we do-for a very long time. In
contrast, scientific studies of the mental lives of animals have
professed to be investigating the nature of animal minds slowly,
cautiously, objectively, with no room for fanciful tales, fables,
or myths. But recently, these folkloric and scientific traditions
have merged in an unexpected and shocking way: scientists have
attempted to prove that at least some animal fables are actually
true.
These interdisciplinary chapters examine how science has
targeted the well-known Aesop's fable \"The Crow and the Pitcher\" as
their starting point. They explore the ever-growing set of
experimental studies which purport to prove that crows possess an
understanding of higher-order concepts like weight, mass, and even
Archimedes' insight about the physics of water displacement.
The Aesop's Fable Paradigm explores how these
scientific studies are doomed to accomplish little more than to
mirror anthropomorphic representations of animals in human folklore
and reveal that the problem of folkloric projection extends far
beyond the \"Aesop's Fable Paradigm\" into every nook and cranny of
research on animal cognition.
eBook
Enactive and Behavioral Abstraction Accounts of Social Understanding in Chimpanzees, Infants, and Adults
We argue against theory-of-mind interpretation of recent false-belief experiments with young infants and explore two other interpretations: enactive and behavioral abstraction approaches. We then discuss the differences between these alternatives.
Journal Article
Impaired Eye Region Search Accuracy in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders
To explore mechanisms underlying reduced fixation of eyes in autism, children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing children were tested in five visual search experiments: simple color feature; color-shape conjunction; face in non-face objects; mouth region; and eye region. No group differences were found for reaction time profile shapes in any of the five experiments, suggesting intact basic search mechanics in children with ASD. Contrary to early reports in the literature, but consistent with other more recent findings, we observed no superiority for conjunction search in children with ASD. Importantly, children with ASD did show reduced accuracy for eye region search (p = .005), suggesting that eyes contribute less to high-level face representations in ASD or that there is an eye region-specific disruption to attentional processes engaged by search in ASD.
Journal Article
Meta-analytic techniques reveal that corvid causal reasoning in the Aesop’s Fable paradigm is driven by trial-and-error learning
The classic Aesop’s fable, Crow and the Pitcher, has inspired a major line of research in comparative cognition. Over the past several years, five articles (over 32 experiments) have examined the ability of corvids (e.g., rooks, crows, and jays) to complete lab-based analogs of this fable, by requiring them to drop stones and other objects into tubes of water to retrieve a floating worm (Bird and Emery in Curr Biol 19:1–5, 2009b; Cheke et al. in Anim Cogn 14:441–455, 2011; Jelbert et al. in PLoS One 3:e92895, 2014; Logan et al. in PLoS One 7:e103049, 2014; Taylor et al. in Gray R D 12:e26887, 2011). These researchers have stressed the unique potential of this paradigm for understanding causal reasoning in corvids. Ghirlanda and Lind (Anim Behav 123:239–247, 2017) re-evaluated trial-level data from these studies and concluded that initial preferences for functional objects, combined with trial-and-error learning, may account for subjects’ performance on key variants of the paradigm. In the present paper, we use meta-analytic techniques to provide more precise information about the rate and mode of learning that occurs within and across tasks. Within tasks, subjects learned from successful (but not unsuccessful) actions, indicating that higher-order reasoning about phenomena such as mass, volume, and displacement is unlikely to be involved. Furthermore, subjects did not transfer information learned in one task to subsequent tasks, suggesting that corvids do not engage with these tasks as variants of the same problem (i.e., how to generate water displacement to retrieve a floating worm). Our methodological analysis and empirical findings raise the question: Can Aesop’s fable studies distinguish between trial-and-error learning and/or higher-order causal reasoning? We conclude they cannot.
Journal Article
Dual systems for all: Higher-order, role-based relational reasoning as a uniquely derived feature of human cognition
Hoerl and McCormack demonstrate that although animals possess a sophisticated temporal updating system, there is no evidence that they also possess a temporal reasoning system. This important case study is directly related to the broader claim that although animals are manifestly capable of first-order (perceptually-based) relational reasoning, they lack the capacity for higher-order, role-based relational reasoning. We argue this distinction applies to all domains of cognition.
Journal Article
Chimpanzees: Joint Visual Attention
Gaze following is a behavior that draws the human infant into perceptual contact with objects or events in the world to which others are attending. One interpretation of the development of this phenomenon is that it signals the emergence of joint or shared attention, which may be critical to the development of theory of mind. An alternative interpretation is that gaze following is a noncognitive mechanism that exploits social stimuli in order to orient the infant (or adult) to important events in the world. We report experimental results that chimpanzees display the effect in response to both movement of the head and eyes in concert and eye movement alone. Additional tests indicate that chimpanzees appear able to (a) project an imaginary line of sight through invisible space and (b) understand how that line of sight can be impeded by solid, opaque objects. This capacity may have arisen because of its reproductive payoffs in the context of social competition with conspecifics, predation avoidance, or both.
Journal Article