Dogs, Cats, Animals and Language: Sorry, but I had to read a little more!
Disclaimer: I am not saying dogs/cats have higher order thinking! :-P And I am going to add a few emojis to see if it makes a difference in what/how you understand. ;-)
I really wanted to find out a little more about dogs/cats and their thinking/language so I decided to do some more reading and find relevant literature. We all spoke about how humans learn socially. However, there have been instances to show that animals learn socially as well. Carel van Schaik and his colleagues at the University of Zurich recently wrote an article, ''The Ecology of Social Learning in Animals and its Link with Intelligence''. Social animals that are reared artificially in captivity have shown to be deficient in many skills that other adult animals are good at. For examples, chimpanzees raised without adult chimpanzees do not know how to build nests or care for young when they become parents themselves. :-O This makes me wonder that everything in animals need not be innate or instinctual as we've most often thought. They too have some basic forms of interactions and learn from observation.
Other examples that they talk about include cross-fostering in wild animals. They found that cockatoos (type of bird) learn their foraging behaviors from their parents, rather than having an innate knowledge that is shaped through trial-and-error. 'Galah cockatoos will forage and eat like Mitchell's cockatoos when they are raised by Mitchell's cockatoos and will largely ignore their fellow Galahs even in adulthood.' Again bringing in basic evidence of social learning. Based on my experiences with my cat and other friends who have pets, I have realized that each pet has its own way of communicating with the owner and say, ask for food. I feel like the owner and pet develop a shared sense of 'meaning' for which actions/behaviors signify what. In order to show that all this goes beyond the general 'conditioning' and 'behaviorism', other researchers like Gregory Berns have been using fMRIs to study dog brains. :-) They have found that same things that activate the human caudate (area between the brain stem and cortex), which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. I am not saying that they may experience these emotions the same way we do, but may be there is some evidence that they 'feel' as well. Neuroscientists have been calling this functional homology, and using it as an indication of canine emotions. Another article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, where Prichard et al (2018) used fMRIs to find neural evidence to show that dogs are able to differentiate between trained words and pseudowords. There was greater activation in parietotemporal cortex to novel pseudowords relative to trained words. ''Thus, even in the absence of a behavioral response, we demonstrate that dogs process human speech at least to the extent of differentiating words they have heard before from those they have not'' , the article quoted. Again this does not mean that animals process words the way we do. In fact there are other researchers showing that animals like dogs may rely on other cues to follow verbal commands as well. This includes gaze, gestures, emotional expressions, as well as intonation. But this means that there is still some meaning making and interpretation happening even in animals.
In conclusion, there is no debate about animals having higher order functions like us :-D, but there is initial evidence to show that they exhibit basic forms of social learning, emotions and understanding. This understanding is developed through their interactions with their surroundings! :-)
I really wanted to find out a little more about dogs/cats and their thinking/language so I decided to do some more reading and find relevant literature. We all spoke about how humans learn socially. However, there have been instances to show that animals learn socially as well. Carel van Schaik and his colleagues at the University of Zurich recently wrote an article, ''The Ecology of Social Learning in Animals and its Link with Intelligence''. Social animals that are reared artificially in captivity have shown to be deficient in many skills that other adult animals are good at. For examples, chimpanzees raised without adult chimpanzees do not know how to build nests or care for young when they become parents themselves. :-O This makes me wonder that everything in animals need not be innate or instinctual as we've most often thought. They too have some basic forms of interactions and learn from observation.
Other examples that they talk about include cross-fostering in wild animals. They found that cockatoos (type of bird) learn their foraging behaviors from their parents, rather than having an innate knowledge that is shaped through trial-and-error. 'Galah cockatoos will forage and eat like Mitchell's cockatoos when they are raised by Mitchell's cockatoos and will largely ignore their fellow Galahs even in adulthood.' Again bringing in basic evidence of social learning. Based on my experiences with my cat and other friends who have pets, I have realized that each pet has its own way of communicating with the owner and say, ask for food. I feel like the owner and pet develop a shared sense of 'meaning' for which actions/behaviors signify what. In order to show that all this goes beyond the general 'conditioning' and 'behaviorism', other researchers like Gregory Berns have been using fMRIs to study dog brains. :-) They have found that same things that activate the human caudate (area between the brain stem and cortex), which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. I am not saying that they may experience these emotions the same way we do, but may be there is some evidence that they 'feel' as well. Neuroscientists have been calling this functional homology, and using it as an indication of canine emotions. Another article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, where Prichard et al (2018) used fMRIs to find neural evidence to show that dogs are able to differentiate between trained words and pseudowords. There was greater activation in parietotemporal cortex to novel pseudowords relative to trained words. ''Thus, even in the absence of a behavioral response, we demonstrate that dogs process human speech at least to the extent of differentiating words they have heard before from those they have not'' , the article quoted. Again this does not mean that animals process words the way we do. In fact there are other researchers showing that animals like dogs may rely on other cues to follow verbal commands as well. This includes gaze, gestures, emotional expressions, as well as intonation. But this means that there is still some meaning making and interpretation happening even in animals.
In conclusion, there is no debate about animals having higher order functions like us :-D, but there is initial evidence to show that they exhibit basic forms of social learning, emotions and understanding. This understanding is developed through their interactions with their surroundings! :-)
I was going to start my post this week with a picture of a cat and a dog doing something smart so thank you for the company!
ReplyDeleteInteresting to learn that observation is one of ways for animals to learn, which also makes sense considering that even when baby animals are limited in communication, they at least can always 'see' how their mothers or other animals fly, hunt, run, etc . Even so, knowing that social learning is a mechanism that works for them sounds interesting. Also, I've seen scenes from one of Korean movie that cows drop tears on their way to the slaughter house. It is intriguing that animals have emotions though it is hard to tell how they are developed.
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