Bold Studies Consider Whether Animals Know What They Don't Know

Wall Street Journal ^ | November 28, 2003 | SHARON BEGLEY

[PatrickHenry]

The bottle-nose dolphin wasn't talking, but as he swam toward the two paddles dangling in the pool at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Fla., his body language spoke volumes.

He had been trained to respond to musical tones piped into the water, pushing one paddle if the pitch was higher than 2,100 cycles per second and a second paddle if it was lower. At tones markedly below 2,100, he swam straight for the correct paddle, touched it, and enjoyed the herring that came his way. But when the scientists played a 2,087 tone, the dolphin slowed down, wavered, or shook its head from side to side.

[djf]

I saw the most remarkable item on birds.

A woman had a parrot, and had a bunch of small plastic toys. Plastic keys, cars, etc of various sizes and colors. She would ask the parrot to pick up the blue car or the red key or the large car.

For every item, the parrot picked up the right thing. And the scientists who watched pretty much agreed that there was no way the woman was somehow subtilely clueing in the parrot on the item.

It was clear the parrot understood the nouns and adjectives. No explanation was offered because the brains of birds are radically different from our brains.

[RaceBannon]

Their turf, Smugglers Cove, Island of Koolawe, near Maui and the Big Island

Smartest mammel is the humans swimming. :)

[forsnax5]

It was clear the parrot understood the nouns and adjectives. No explanation was offered because the brains of birds are radically different from our brains.

Not a birdbrain: the African Gray parrot.

Check out this article about Alex (above) and Griffin:

"THAT DAMN BIRD"

[djf]

Thanks. Good link. Anybody who reads things like this have to admit there is far more going on than what meets the eye.

And in my six years of freeping, that's the first time anybody pinged me to an article that mentions Piaget. Kudos!

[Old Professer]

My dogs can read my mind.

[Ditter]

LOL You beat me to it. My dog can read my mind too, then he can tell me what he wants by certain movements of his head or body.

[_Jim]

It was clear the parrot understood the nouns and adjectives. No explanation was offered because the brains of birds are radically different from our brains.

I've got my small bird working via several verbal cues; I ask him 1) can I pick you up 2) do you wanno go outside 3) do you wanna go for a drive (he loves this) and one command: "shake".

Answers to the negative: he'll 'beak' my hand or gently squeeze a finger - a 'yes' is indicated by his anxious stepping onto my hand ...

At times he's *not* willing to simply be 'picked up' *but* he is willing to go outside or go for a drive!

[js1138]

African Grays definitely challenge the derogatory term, birdbrain. I would say that in many respects they are smarter than dogs.

[Scenic Sounds]

It is usually a mistake to anthropomorphize even intelligent beasts like dolphins,

That is an easy mistake to make. Animals are different. Humans are superior to dogs and probably all animals intellectually, but dogs are more spiritually evolved than humans.

[Doc On The Bay]

Having been the "Companion" of a Couple Grays--as well as numerous Dogs & Cats--& having observed Their behavior, I am Forced to Admit that a Number of "Creatures" who willingly associate with Us are FAR More "Aware" that we have traditionally believed.

We would "Do Well" if we made an effort to understand them; they are FAR MORE AWARE of Their & Our Lives--& our Interactions--than we traditionally believe.

Doc

[Ichneumon]

But not smart enough to say, "Hey, wait a sec. If I follow this program I'm gonna die!"

Heh -- check out John Carpenter's very first (extremely low-budget) film, "Dark Star" (1974). It has a real "cult" following. There's a (hilarious) subplot about a "smart bomb" that's a little *too* smart. At one point the crew ends up arguing philosophy with Bomb#20 to try to convince it to do its job.

[Ichneumon]

A woman had a parrot, and had a bunch of small plastic toys. Plastic keys, cars, etc of various sizes and colors. She would ask the parrot to pick up the blue car or the red key or the large car.

That's Dr. Irene Pepperberg, and her star research parrot is "Alex", although she has several others as well.

She's been studying parrot cognition for years, and her work is very solid. And the birds can do more than just pick out the item she asks for. They can verbally answer questions like, "how many wooden squares do you see?" (among a tray of various shapes, colors, and materials), "how are these things the same?" (e.g., if they're all red but different shapes and materials, the bird will answer "color"), "what color are they?" ("red"), "how are these different?" (if the same color and material but different shape, the bird will answer "shape"), etc.

Even the way they get "wrong" answers can often be revealing. Once Alex was getting obviously cranky and tired, but the testing continued. Finally when asked to touch a certain item on the tray, Alex pointedly touched every item on the tray *except* the correct one, then flipped the tray over. That sounds to me like a clear intention to give the experimenters the finger in a way that the bird knew would be understood.

I own three parrots myself, and they can indeed be eerily intelligent. Their vocal responses (or questions) are almost always perfectly appropriate for the situation, and not just reflexively, either. They often use old words or phrases in new situations that show the ability to generalize their meaning, and can assemble new sentences from individual words they know.

One of my birds is an expert lockpicker, and keeps unlocking his cage from the inside -- and then goes to each of the other two cages and unlocks *them* too, to let the other two birds out, then return to his own cage.

Parrots are also very adept at manipulating their owners. It's often not clear whether the owners are training the birds or vice versa. But they frequently do things that make it clear that they're considering the humans' mental states, like the time a parrot kept getting blocked when he was trying to go chew on some shoes, so he suddenly rolled over on his back and started acting goofy (waving his feet, wagging his tongue, etc.) -- and the moment the people in the room started laughing at his antics, he popped back upright and ran for the shoes.

Or pets' mental states. More than one parrot owner has reported things like a parrot that will fling nuts at the dog only when the dog's back is turned, and then look away and "act innocent" when the dog whips around to see what/who is hitting him. Then as soon as the dog turns around again... Rinse, repeat.

I once read article by a woman who owned several "old" parrots (like 50+ years). She said that people often asked her how old parrots differed from young parrots. Her answer was, "you absolutely can not put anything over on them. They've got it all figured out." You can't trick them back into their cage, they'll see it coming a mile away, and so on.

[Ichneumon]

[It is usually a mistake to anthropomorphize even intelligent beasts like dolphins,]

That is an easy mistake to make. Animals are different.

On the other hand, it's also easy to make the reverse mistake, trying to "explain away" all apparently intelligent behavior in animals as somehow necessarily "mechanical".

There's a really good book on this whole subject entitled "The Human Nature of Birds". The author examines various kinds of bird behavior and challenges the reader to consider that it may be different from human intelligence in degree, but not necessarily in kind. As he says in the introduction, while it's probably a mistake to presume that behavior that looks intelligent (or "conscious" if you will) *must* be intelligent, it's equally a mistake to simply presume that it *isn't*. And the latter view ("presuming it isn't) has been the "accepted" position of most animal behavioralists over the past few decades -- the pendulum has swung too far that way and needs to come back from such an extreme outook.

One of his examples is the time a woman removed the top of one of the birdhouses in her backyard to clean it, thinking it was empty. She frightened a mother songbird on her nest, who flew off to a nearby tree. The woman quickly put the top back on the birdhouse and went back inside. She was amazed to see that about five minutes later, when the bird's mate returned, the female flew over to meet him and then started chattering at him. When she was done, the male flew over to the birdhouse, and *inspected the roof*. When he seemed satisfied, the pair re-entered the bird house.

[Ichneumon]

My dogs can read my mind.

Join the club. My house is about as close as one can get to "no routine whatsoever", but my dogs can still predict what I'm about to do when (one of them better than the other). For example somehow she knows when I'm about to go check on the parrots in their room, and she get to the door ahead of me. (She loves to hoover up the morsels of food that the birds manage to drop -- they may be smart, but they're messy eaters.)

[Ichneumon]

I wish I could remember where it was, but one "seaworld" type park had trained their dolphins to respond appropriately to the command, "do something new".

When that command is given, the dolphins use their "imaginations" (and check against their memories) to come up with some new action that they haven't done before, then do it. That alone seems to me to prove an actual sort of cognition and not just "mindless" behavior.

But the way they do it is thought-provoking too. For example one time the trainer asked the two dolphins to "do something new", and the dolphins swam side-by-side, leapt out of the water together, then simultaneously spit a mouthful of water at the trainer. Indeed, they'd never done that before. But ponder this -- the dolphins had to somehow *preplan* their coordinated action together. The swimming and jumping might possibly be explained by a "follow the leader" mode, whereby one dolphin just followed the other one's actions a few tenths of a second behind the other one -- that would look simultaneous enough. But that doesn't explain how both ended up in mid-air with a retained mouthful of water to spit at the top of their leap... It seems that there's no other explanation except for the notion that in some way, the dolphins formulated the plan and communicated it before executing it, like one saying to the other, "I know, let's both grab a mouthful of water, jump up, and spit at George."

[KC_for_Freedom]

I always loved that description of how the guidance feedback algorithms work. Fortunately I was in hardware and the software guys (like you I think?) had to puzzle out those where it is and where it isn't stuff.

[djf]

RE: #31 "Let there be light!!" Great flick. As far as animal intelligence goes, I'm certain there are many animals that have far more than we give them credit for. I've heard of octopi doing things (problem solving, getting into difficult places, etc) that are stunning. One of the followers of Jane Goodall was observing chimps in the wild. When evening approached, two of the chimps went off and sat on a ledge and watched the sunset, a particularly spectacular one. All the other chimps kept on doing chimp things, like making their nightime beds in the trees, but the other two watched the sunset for quite awhile. One cannot help but wonder if they had some sort of a cosmic sense at that time, perhaps this woman was privileged enough to observe the very first time in history that a chimp thought about God. The whole subject is fascinating, I spent many of my early years pondering AI, finally concluding true AI could never be accomplished with our own limited understanding of what's in us and in other species.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[PatrickHenry]

Dead thread P L A C E M A R K E R

[RadioAstronomer]

Reminds me of the work that was done by Dr. John C. Lilly. :-)