7b. MacLean, E.L., Matthews, L.J., Hare, B.A., Nunn, C.L., Anderson, R.C., Aureli, F., Brannon, E.M., Call, J., Drea, C.M., Emery, N.J. and Haun, D.B. (2012) How does cognition evolve?Phylogenetic comparative psychology. Animal Cognition, 15(2): 223-238.
Now more than ever animal studies have the potential to test hypotheses regarding how cognition evolves. Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly skillful at adapting methodologies to test multiple species. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have generated quantitative approaches to investigate the phylogenetic distribution and function of phenotypic traits, including cognition. In particular, phylogenetic methods can quantitatively (1) test whether specific cognitive abilities are correlated with life history (e.g., lifespan), morphology (e.g., brain size), or socio-ecological variables (e.g., social system), (2) measure how strongly phylogenetic relatedness predicts the distribution of cognitive skills across species, and (3) estimate the ancestral state of a given cognitive trait using measures of cognitive performance from extant species. Phylogenetic methods can also be used to guide the selection of species comparisons that offer the strongest tests of a priori predictions of cognitive evolutionary hypotheses (i.e., phylogenetic targeting). Here, we explain how an integration of comparative psychology and evolutionary biology will answer a host of questions regarding the phylogenetic distribution and history of cognitive traits, as well as the evolutionary processes that drove their evolution.
Now more than ever animal studies have the potential to test hypotheses regarding how cognition evolves. Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly skillful at adapting methodologies to test multiple species. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have generated quantitative approaches to investigate the phylogenetic distribution and function of phenotypic traits, including cognition. In particular, phylogenetic methods can quantitatively (1) test whether specific cognitive abilities are correlated with life history (e.g., lifespan), morphology (e.g., brain size), or socio-ecological variables (e.g., social system), (2) measure how strongly phylogenetic relatedness predicts the distribution of cognitive skills across species, and (3) estimate the ancestral state of a given cognitive trait using measures of cognitive performance from extant species. Phylogenetic methods can also be used to guide the selection of species comparisons that offer the strongest tests of a priori predictions of cognitive evolutionary hypotheses (i.e., phylogenetic targeting). Here, we explain how an integration of comparative psychology and evolutionary biology will answer a host of questions regarding the phylogenetic distribution and history of cognitive traits, as well as the evolutionary processes that drove their evolution.
All animals solve problems. However, I wonder if the manner differs in human and nonhuman animals (so it would be fair to say something like, humans have a different kind of problem-solving mechanism, rather than just a more developed version of the same one that other animals have). This would be consistent with why other animals who may have larger brains (e.g. whales) or a greater brain-to-body ratio (dolphins?) are not as intelligent as humans – the way the brain is put together ultimately matters more than how much of it you have. I’m using intelligence here as being synonymous with “capacity to solve-problems”.. I think it’s fair to say that humans can solve more problems and many more different kinds of problems compared to other animals. I don’t have a clear idea of what that different problem-solving mechanism might be or how it works, but I started thinking about it after reading this research paper (ft. Gazzaniga) in my neuropsychology course (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/20/6/RC64.full.pdf) which discussed decision making in a probability guessing experiment in humans which was noted as frequency matching (trying to pick by matching prior occurrences) and nonhumans which was noted as maximizing (always picking the option that appears most often). I wonder if this was getting at the idea that human and nonhuman animals may not be solving problems in the same way. If so, I wonder at what point in our evolutionary past that jump to a different mechanism was made; which still makes the methods of phylogenetic comparative psychology very important.
ReplyDeleteI think humans and non human mammals have different problem stratagems because humans can use words and write down the solutions (use symbolic language), actively think about the problem and so on, while non human mammals have limited capacities to find a strategy.
DeleteAlthough their methods are different, what I find intriguing is that some animals are able to solve problems that humans have a lot of trouble solving. May that be because of different environment or brain structure, probably, but still super interesting.
I agree with Isaure. I think the skill of language allows humans to problem-solve in a more creative, mindful, intentional way. That being said the similarities we share with animals I think are more prominent on a primitive level. For example, most animals (if not all) have the flight or fight response which allows them to solve a problem based on their physiological experiences. Again, we can rationalize the concept of fight or flight with our language and, thus, explain and understand why we did something, while other animals don't have that capability.
DeleteHugo, what is "problem-solving capacity" (and how is it related to category learning)?
DeleteProbability maximizing is better than probability matching, but it's not much of an inroad on T3 capacity...
Isaure, Language certainly puts us in a different league: How? Why? (And what are the problems nonhuman species can solve that humans cannot? Even with the help of language?
Tina, fight vs fight, like probability maximizing vs matching is a long, long way from T3...
"do apes possess derived cognitive abilities not found in other primates?"
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting question because the answer to it provides a basis for understanding the phylogenic categories through which cognition can differ. The paper seems to suggest that great-apes do have higher cognition (at least in terms of self-recognition), since they can perform successfully on the mirror recognition task. This developed when the apes split off genetically from the monkeys, however I wonder what in the environment of the apes that forced them to develop this ability and not monkeys (or if it was simple genetic chance). These phylogenetic differences in cognition are important to help us try and understand what it is that contributes to cognition (an interaction of genetics and environment to be sure, but what quantities of each?). Predictions of how human cognition developed can be postulated in varying direction based on the answer provided by phylogenetic comparative psychology, making it critical for cognitive science.
It would be nice to know how and why apes recognize themselves in a mirror and monkeys don't, but, again, it's all far from T3.
Delete« Thus, one major challenge is for comparative psychologists to develop dependent measures that can meaningfully be interpreted as traits. In some rare cases, it is possible that performance on a single task may meet this criterion. However, in many cases, it is domains of cognition rather than performance on single tasks that is most interesting for comparative analysis »
ReplyDeleteI think that this is an excellent approach to unpacking the diverse range of cognitive abilities across species. My only concern is that some measurements may not be as accurate as the experimenter’s think simply because there are cognitive «areas» that overlap. For example, testing the ability to learn to categorize different objects and the ability to make correct choices or do the right action for a situation (behavioural activation/inhibition) are closely related. How can experimenters ensure that they are not testing more than one cognitive domain with a specific measurement?
I think your question here gets to the root of behavioral paradigm creation and testing. Inherently most behavioral tasks test numerous domains of cognition, because most of what we do entails combining numerous aspects of our cognition: language with memory, etc. etc. Now, I think think whether certain things we do utilize overlapping aspects of cognition is another question. I think that this is for sure true. However, I do not think that tasks assessing one domain of cognition and also measuring another are necessarily less accurate. Perhaps you could say they are less specific to a single domain of cognition. I think it is more important to focus on assessing how domains of cognition function within different paradigms. As they say in the paper: "One potential solution to this challenge is the use of composite measures, derived from multiple tasks designed to measure cognitive abilities in a given domain."
DeleteZach, and still more generally, doesn't learning "to do the right thing with the right kind of thing" not cover it all? (Covering, though, is easier than reverse-engineering it all...)
DeleteMarcus, do MacLean et al cats any light on the "Easy Problem"? (Saying there are modules as well as "general ability" does not seem to explain much...)
"A first important question is whether differences in particular cognitive abilities correlate with changes in independent variables, such as life history, ecological, or social factors. For example, the social intelligence hypothesis has provided a guiding framework for comparative studies for decades”
ReplyDeleteIntuitively, the social intelligence hypothesis seems to highlight the complexity and nuances of social life that guided the evolution of cognition. As stated in the reading, the prediction of the hypothesis is that changes in social complexity in different evolutionary lineages will be coupled with changes in the cognitive abilities required to survive in the social group. What’s interesting for me here is that the authors discuss to the anatomical methodology used to analyze datasets, immediately pointing to brain size. Maybe this is a product of the time this hypothesis was conceptualized, but there’s more complex anatomical methods that can be employed to test the hypothesis. For example, neural substrate connectivity seems like a promising approach, which doesn’t assume that cognition is one-dimensional and can vary only quantitatively. Here the phylogenetic comparative method is mentioned to serve as a novel avenue in examining the relationship between direct measures of cognition and explanatory variables. The social intelligence hypothesis would suggest that the social complexity drives disparities not only in humans cross-culturally, but other lineages. Later this article asserts that “the majority of cognitive traits likely evolve along more subtle dimensions and will not cleanly map onto major lineages of a phylogeny” and this hypothesis seems to be in line with this.
What is the "social intelligence hypothesis"? And how does it advance us on the road to T3?
Delete"Comparative psychologists will need to focus on standardizing the essential components of each task while allowing for variation in other parameters required for a valid comparison between species."
ReplyDeleteThe issue of standardization and limiting bias within a study can be said for many different aspects and branches of psychology not just comparative psychologists. It is so difficult to standardize and control all the different human variables and experiences each individual person go through. The same thing can be said for the different animals used in comparative psychology. Although it might be slightly easier to control (raise each dog/bird the exact same way), there is still such a huge margin for error that can bias your studies results. This is one of psychology's weaknesses as a whole and not just comparative psychology.
Just as human intelligence tests and performance do not explain the mechanism underlying the capacities being tested, cross-species comparative measures don't explain it either. "Intelligence" is cognitive capacity, and that is what cognitive science must reverse-engineer, for our species as well as the others.
DeleteThis article was enlightening with respect to the fact that our understanding of our own species, humanity, stems significantly from acquired knowledge about the cognitions of nonhumans; phylogenetic techniques can significantly advance the way in which we perceive and understand how some of our cognitive functions are expressed in other species, e.g. more similar species such as apes, or farther ones such as, let's say, cats, sheds light upon the reasons why these specific functions prevail in our lives, and why some have been eclipsed.
ReplyDeleteI also felt this paper was very informative. Its interesting to see how comparative psychologists use measures to distinguish different evolutionary processes based on individual differences between species and by examining that the more differences, the more variability between species and therefore, less adaptability. However, I do think its tough to measure the cognitive abilities of other species as stated in the article and it is necessary that the psychologists take into the other minds problem when measuring these abilities across nonhumans.
DeleteI definitely agree, I found this paper incredibly interesting but strangely what captivated me was the amount of progress and information that could be recovered in the field without any previous information. It’s amazing how we can infer things about earlier humans and their abilities despite the fact that we have not yet completely figured out the brains of the humans that exist today.
DeleteThis article was a great follow up to the first reading of this week (7a) after which some of us in the class raised some concerned about the validity of evolutionary psychology research in the comments. Combining evolutionary concepts like phylogeny with comparative psychology to understand how cognitive abilities evolved in humans seems very logical to me, as opposed to using evolutionary psychology to explain culturally specific/current social phenomenon such as attractiveness. Research on cognitive domains that integrates and analyzes information from multiple species surely makes the evidence for the explanations of underlying processes of cognition much stronger.
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt that comparative biological and phylogentic evidence is more informative and credible than the culture-based Just-So stories of evolutionary psychology, but is there a boundary between them?
Delete"In doing so, we stand to gain an understanding of how cognition evolves in nonhumans, as well as a better understanding of the evolutionary processes that gave rise to the human mind."
ReplyDeleteWe can never know if another human being is cognizing because of the other minds problem; we can only infer that they are thinking and feeling based on behavioral data. If this problem persists in human cognition, doesn't that mean that it must also be an issue when comparing cognition across different species? This makes me doubt the validity of the statement above. Just because we observe similarities in behavioral output across species, does not guarantee similarity in cognitive patterns.
There is definitely an "other minds problem" across other species too: That's what the summer school on the other-minds problem is other species will be about in June!
DeleteI also struggled with this statement. As you mentioned, because of the other-minds problem we will never know if another human is cognizing, let alone another species.
DeleteMore specifically, I struggled with MacLean et al.’s (2012) use of the word ‘how’ when they say, “we stand to gain an understanding of HOW cognition evolves in nonhumans”.
We as humans uniquely possess the capability of language, allowing us to tell others our feelings/thoughts and vice versa, as well as the capacity for empathy and mind-reading, which enables us to infer from the behaviour of others what state they are own given our own behaviour in that state. As a result, the other-minds problem within our human species is minimized (Harnad, 2016). However, given the magnitude of the other-minds problem across all other species, who lack these unique capabilities, and given that we have not yet generated an account of the “how's” of cognition amongst humans, I feel that gaining an understanding of the “how’s” of cognition in non-human species is overly ambitious, and henceforth this statement is too far-reaching.
http://animalstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1065&context=animsent
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DeleteI supposed my thoughts on the article (besides wondering why scientists can't all take kid Sib approaches in their writing) are that I do not really see how these methods will shine any light on the easy question. "In doing so, we stand to gain an understanding of how cognition evolves in nonhumans, as well as a better understanding of the evolutionary processes that gave rise to the human mind." Alrighty, but as was mentioned in the previous article to simply say it "evolved" doesn't get us any closer to understanding the mechanisms (the how). In relation to Devona's comment: "Just because we observe similarities in behavioral output across species, does not guarantee similarity in cognitive patterns" - Even if it did guarantee similarity in cognitive patterns, does that not leave us with the same problem as when attempting the easy question with regards to humans? Even if we could assume the patterns are the same or similar due to observing similar behavioural output that still does not tell us how and why these things work the way they do. For the easy question, whether or not an animal can demonstrate similar behavioural outcomes is kind of inconsequential…if we could reverse engineer these similar behavioural outcomes is a different story!
DeleteAlthough phylogeny and comparative psychology are of value and can potentially further our knowledge about cognition in humans, it is important to approach animal studies in psychological science with caution because the concepts measured are often subjective. We interpret animal behaviours as indicators of a certain phenomenon (e.g. social isolation as a proxy for depression, loneliness, etc.) so that they suit the research at hand. This makes me think of the other minds problem - behaviour on its own does not guarantee the presence of a mind or consciousness. Though the described phylogenetic methods do support the goals and achievements of comparative psychology, it can be dangerous to extrapolate too much meaning from these studies as far as human cognition goes. I agree that cognition should be studied with vigor across species, but when methods and tasks for animals get increasingly complex, there may be a human bias acting on the results of the study. The complexity of a methodology does not make animal research more empirically valid - sometimes it can even be a confounding factor in the study.
ReplyDeleteMind-reading other species is no more likely to solve the "easy" problem than in mind-reading our own species. But is it really "unscientific" to ignore (as "anthropomorphism") what our mind-reading capacities seem to be telling us? Mammals are, after all, remarkably good mind-readers...
Delete“We are now in a position to quantitatively examine Tinbergen’s other two questions for biological analysis: the phylogenetic distribution and function of cognitive traits.”
ReplyDeleteWe have always known the morphological differences between animals of the same species, and how differing environments plays a role in determining which phenotypes prosper and which don’t. It seems logical that different species adapted to different environment would also develop unique cognitive skills that best suit their physical and social needs. This new area of research delves into the abstract realm of the cognitive traits that develop differentially for these different species. This undertaking is understandably difficult when creating cognitive tests between species as discussed in this paper. From a human cognition point of view this research might be best used to test intraspecies cognition, perhaps from slightly different environments/ regions. In this case differential cognitive findings could be best related to the small genetic or environmental differences rather than sorting through a plethora of genetic and environmental differentiation. I understand the usefulness of testing multiple species using correlated trait evolution, phylogenetic signal, and ancestral state reconstruction to relate findings between species, but I am concerned the amount of uncertainty in this research could still undermine their findings.
Is what we need tests and measures of animal performance capacies? Or do we rather need models that explain the capacities (by generating them, T3-style)? After all, we already have a pretty good idea of what animals can and can't do. Isn't it time to try starting to reverse-engineer how they do it?
DeleteI’m baffled by the authors’ claim that they can reconstruct ancestral states of cognition and thereby measure the cognitive traits of extinct species that humans and other animals evolved from.
ReplyDeleteI understand that being able to measure the traits of these extinct species would be helpful towards deepening our understanding of cognitive evolution. However I don’t understand how the researchers think that they can reconstruct and measure the cognitive traits of extinct species.
It’s totally possible to make educated guesses on what traits they may have had, but to create a reconstruction and make then claims based off of it seems far fetched to me.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on this. Solely based on the fact that we do not have a definitive answer as to how language originated, I have many doubts as to how the authors of this paper hold that they would be able to reconstruct the cognitive states and cognitive traits of long-gone species. There are multiple theories of the origin of language such as mimicking animals or noises found in the environment, or noises made as responses to pain; since there has not been agreement on even this, how would anyone be able to measure all cognitive traits of extinct species which humans are evolutionary descendants of?
DeleteI also took issue with this. I had a hard time following what gave them such confidence that looking at existing tools or archaeology of the time could inform the complexity of any species inner life or cognition.
DeleteAlthough the confidence intervals that they mentioned were not so narrow, I had difficulty agreeing that the statistical results to their questions about inhibitory control could be considered truly meaningful.
I felt that maybe I was getting lost in the technicality of their explanations - but I was not convinced be the case they made.
It also seems to me that we would need a much more sophisticated understanding of comparative phylogeny in present day species before we could map backwards in any reliably, statistically confident manner.
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ReplyDeleteAlthough the paper proposes that understanding how cognition evolves in non humans can provide insight into the processes that developed the human mind, can understanding cognition in animals help us on the way to T3? Can a phylogenetic map of the distribution of cognition explain how it actually works, and would that at all help us reverse engineer cognition in any species? Earlier in the semester it was stated that that the Turing Test is ideal for human capacities, and unlike biological sciences, it would not be easier to start with creating a T3 worm-robot and working our way up through the levels of complexity. The other minds problem is a barrier between us and a T3 human-robot as much as it is between us and a a T3 worm-robot, but I understood that the the ability to communicate with/interrogate the human-robot would provide a level of feedback inaccessible with the worm-robot. Is Harnad suggesting in the comments that the only way to explain the capacities of these mammals is to generate them through T3? Is this because in being able to explain the causal underlying mechanism, you’d essentially be creating a blueprint to create it? Does this necessarily follow?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Christina, I found this article to contain a lot of interesting and novel approaches to looking at the evolution of cognition -- specifically using phylogenetic techniques in order to deepen our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms used in species beyond our own. However, I am struggling to see the direct connections between how understanding how cognition in certain species has evolved will bring us substantially closer to answering the question of T3? For example, the authors claim:
Delete"Because great apes tend to show self-directed behavior in response to their image in a mirror, but monkeys do not, the prevailing view is that this form of visual self-recognition evolved in primates after the divergence of the ape and Old World monkey lineages. Although this example may indicate a qualitative cognitive transition between two clades, the majority of cognitive traits likely evolve along more subtle dimensions and will not cleanly map onto major lineages of a phylogeny."
Even though we may know the point in time with respect to evolution that certain cognitive traits begin to develop in some species, but not in others, this does not tell us in terms of functionality what is different between species X and species Y and how we can use this to get us closer to reverse engineering a human. Perhaps I missed something in the article, but I am struggling to see how we can get from point A to point B with techniques like this, especially when they seem to have inconsistencies in study findings to begin with.
While the Confer article spoke about how the environment experienced by human populations in the past has led to the development of certain behaviors, the Maclean article discusses the evolution of cognition by looking at the relationships between species. I think that in some ways, the methods of comparative psychology could help evolutionary psychology overcome some shortcomings. In evolutionary psychology, it is very hard for researchers to account for individual differences in abilities within human populations and I think that the concept of phylogenetic signal could help researchers to get a quantitative sense of the extent to which individual differences play a role in the development of some ability which can be useful in considering the overall benefit of the trait.
ReplyDeleteThe quantitative nature of comparative psychology certainly allows for the study of the evolution of cognition among animal species to take on a precision that we can’t get to in other related areas studying evolution. Although the discipline is trying to diversify its species comparison base, I do think that in some ways the set-up of this field as very correlation dependent in nature makes it highly prone to confirmation bias where researchers will constantly seek out those pairs which have very common phylogenies to the detriment of other potential comparisons. In doing so, research in this field may miss out on determining aspects of cognition which underlie many different species and thus fail to account for the development of cognition across a greater portion of the animal kingdom.
I wonder how much of these findings with animals can be accurately translated to humans. It is the case the humans and animals are similar in many ways, but there are also many aspects of both that are a mystery to us, and I am not sure if their cognition can be compared in this way. The paper describes how social complexity was the cause of increases in cognitive flexibility in primates. As times progress and evolve, social complexity it always changing and evolving along with it, so is this to say that cognitive flexibility will continue to change in these ways?
ReplyDeleteHumans and non-human animals share many attributes, but there are some attributes that are inaccessible to non-human animals. Language makes up the majority of human-human interaction and is prominent in social settings. Complex social behaviours such as language evolved because humans have arguably the most complex social situations.; it makes sense that an equally complex behaviour needed to evolve as compensation. In other words, social complexity affects cognitive flexibility. I question why much social research pertaining to humans is performed in animal models given the differences in the complexity of our social organizations and interactions. I don’t doubt that perhaps certain animals share evolved traits such as facial recognition, but the reasoning for its development have to be different.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how exactly “endocast features, artifacts, or ancient DNA” can tell us much about cognitive traits. Could we really approximate human cognitive abilities by examining these “fossilized proxies for cognition”? We share close to 100% of our DNA with chimpanzees, but we have very many cognitive capacities that chimpanzees do not, therefore I am having trouble understanding how examining slight differences in DNA can inform us on differences in cognitive capacities. Furthermore, the structure of the brain that is made available from endocasts does not seem very informative, as it only provides a very rough idea of the differences between the brains of different species, such as size and shape of different areas, which in my understanding says little to nothing about cognition. I am also unsure that artifacts can provide much insight into cognitive capacities, since we cannot be certain about what these objects were used for and even if we could be, many cognitive capacities such as language are not apparent from artifacts. In short, I am sceptical about the reconstruction of ancestral states and would have appreciated a more comprehensive account of its underlying methods in the paper.
ReplyDelete“Because cognitive performance does not fossilize, one cannot directly measure the cognitive traits of extinct species; however, new phylogenetic methods allow researchers to reconstruct values at the ancestral nodes in a phylogeny and to place statistical measures of confidence on these reconstructions”
ReplyDeleteSomething that greatly fascinates me about evolutionary psychology is the amount that we are able to learn and reconstruct from the small amount of information that we have. Although this is an important science I think it is valuable at times to be reminded of the fact that we do not have all the information about the past and therefore will most likely never have all the answers. I wonder if ever there will come a time when people are capable of looking back and definitively understanding the people of the past.
While it is interesting to see what phylogeny can bring to the discussion of cognition and how it came to be that humans seem to be able to do so much more than other animals, just looking at other animals seems to shorten the problem to the easy problem. Animals can only help understand how we do what we do, and not why we do it; and it seems that there is such a large gap between our cognition and animals’ cognition that phylogeny might not be able to explain the hard problem. But looking at our ancestors is a good way to understand how we came to be how we are today, and evolutionary psychology looks at our Homo Sapiens ancestors to explain this. While evolutionary psychology also has problems because it infers things about the past rather than looking at hard evidence, it offers a contrastive view to phylogeny about where and how to look into the past to understand what makes humans so different from other species and why we are the way we are.
ReplyDeleteIn looking for "domains of cognition" as a phylogenetic trait, I have to wonder if this is the best method for attempting to answer the "why" part of the cognition problem. Similarly with the neuroimaging issue, phylogenetic comparative psych can do a pretty good job at explaining how cognition may have evolved over the millennia, but still doesn't quite get at why this trait would have been selected for over generations. I'm interested to see if we could combine different fields of psychology (evolutionary, neuroimaging, computational, etc) to attack the problem from all sides...
ReplyDelete“Once an appropriate task is identified, the task may prove so easy (or difficult) for some species that large amounts of meaningful variation may be masked by the method’s bluntness. In other words, variation in the underlying cognitive abilities may be obscured due to ceiling or floor effects in certain species (Shettleworth 2010). This problem can be overcome by using a double-tiered approach that adjusts the difficulty of testing based on the performance of different clades on an initial comparison. For example, imagine that a range of primates participated in a gaze following task that simply measured whether subjects co-oriented with an individual that oriented her head to look upward. Suppose that all apes tested in this procedure followed gaze at similarly high rates, but no prosimian species ever co-oriented. Although this initial result reveals only large-scale differences among distantly related taxa (e.g., all apes, but no prosimians, follow gaze), we could re-test all the species with a second measure(s) that would be tailored to reveal variation within each clade“
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me like this paper is comparing the cognition of each of the species against human-like measures of cognition, such as the gaze following task described above. However, I see a few issues with these kinds of tasks. Firstly, as was mentioned in the text, if there is a species that is simply unable to do the task, that doesn’t prove that they have low cognitive abilities, all it proves is that they are unable to do the task. It’s difficult to then extrapolate from there and assume that they have a lower cognition. For example, there are blind humans who would be unable to do this task, but that does not mean that they have impaired cognitive abilities. It just means that they cannot perform well on the task. Secondly, I don’t see why these tasks are chosen as good measures of cognition. Each species would have its own evolutionarily adaptive behaviours and if the particular behaviour measured in the study is not adaptive for a given species, then they would naturally perform below their competitors.
“One rationale for this research is that if we understand how cognition evolves in nonhumans, this knowledge may in turn inform our understanding of how our own species’ cognitive abilities have evolved”
ReplyDeleteI found this paper very interesting/insightful, but I got caught up on a few aspects about the above statement. Firstly, it seemed odd to me that they categorized all “nonhuman cognition” into one group, as there are so many different species with varying capabilities. For example, the paper cites the social intelligence hypothesis which suggests that the more primates can learn to live in social settings, the more cognitive flexibility they have. While I don’t dismiss the role of these social settings on the primate’s ability to cognize, this seems like an incredibly narrow way to categorize cognition. For instance, the Mimic Octopus is a solidarity animal that is able to not only morph its body into over 13 different shapes, but is also able to learn its different predators AND which morph each of these predators fear the most. Therefore, when it encounters a specific adversary in the ocean, it is able to use its past learning to employ the morph that will be most successful in deterring its predator. The Mimic Octopus is capable of making a difficult, context-based decision, which seems like its own brand of cognition, that has little to do with social living.
The second part about this paper that struck me as odd was the claim that understanding cognition in nonhumans allows us to learn something about cognition in humans. As humans, we are not even able to know if another human is able to cognize (other mind’s problem) and must conclude that they are based on their behaviour. As we are so limited, even when discussing other humans, why do we think that analyzing another species’ cognitive functions will aid us?
From what I understood, phylogenetic looks at the relationship between several species and their evolutions to see the similarity and differences among them and their cognitive abilities. However, all these measures are correlational and thus, it is not possible to draw any causational conclusion. On top of this, they looked at very similar species and found important differences, so I do not see the interest of studying their brain to infer conclusion about their development if there is so much difference between the species and also within them. Yes, it is very interesting and they may find an enormous amount of information, but will it be transferable to humans? I do not think so. If there are important differences between very similar animals, there is no way that these differences are lesser when compared with human’s brain.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that the collaboration between researcher is mandatory because it will help the domain to develop faster. I also hope that by studying animals’ cognitive abilities, more respect will be given to animals and people will realise that despite our differences, we are very much alike.
Though written by those who believe in the phylogenetic methods to discovering how cognition evolved, the overwhelming disadvantages monopolized this reading for me. For starters, the paper opens by stating that their research cannot answer why certain lineages evolved to posses their cognitive abilities, nor help understand how or when species evolved to differ cognitively. This inability to prove causation is contradicted by their ending statements that "progress toward revealing the development and causal mechanisms of problem solving skills in animals". As with most failing explanations, the value of research is somewhat nullified without a way to answer when, where, how and why. Additionally, this research cannot generate dependent measures that can be traced back to explicit traits. Rather than capturing the full domain of cognition, only single tasks can be tested. Though these tasks might trace back well to the full domain, there is no way of knowing if they fully catch all of the caveats and complexities of cognition. I would, however, be interested in reading more about the tasks that these studies designed in attempts to replicate all of the abilities that are in cognition. Lastly, the results of the data points of these studies are interpreted as not statistically independent from one another, which questions the validity of the analysis of results.
ReplyDeleteOne of the biggest advantages of this approach is the collaboration that is possible for comparative psychology. However, I can't see how this strength is specific only to these comparison studies.
As a science I believe comparative psychology and evolutionary biology have immense value to our understanding of cognition. Some of the comments on this reading brought up the other minds problem which in the context of their arguments are correct, but to apply that to everything would be to stop comparative psychology all together because there is no measurable way of showing feeling and thinking and thus it is not a mark against the science but just a variable that is to be noted whenever any experiment is being structured.
ReplyDelete"One rationale for this research is that if we understand how cognition evolves in nonhumans, this knowledge may in turn inform our understanding of how our own species’ cognitive abilities have evolved" This statement is why I believe this paper was assigned which was to get us to think about does study into animal cognition have value to understanding human cognition and answering the "how" question aka understanding the mechanisms of the cognitive ability being tested which would one day help us build a T3. The answer to that is a yes and a no. No, because comparative psychology alone is correlational and that doesn't go deep enough to get us causative mechanisms. Yes, because in accordance with evolutionary biology and neuroscience there is a framework to understanding mechanisms. What comparative psychology does is give the correlation required for evolutionary biologists to determine with empirical evidence whether there is homology between certain neurological structures, which then leads neuroscientists to examine cell morphology, expression of neurotransmitters and receptors, molecularity and hodology to understand just how the brain produces the electrical activity for a specific human behavior. So in that way it is an effort to answer the easy problem, which deals with the how and what we are capable of.
This article was engaging post grappling with culture related queries from the previous article because it showed how much more reliable comparative biological and phylogenetic substantiation is. There is a reason why we use animal models, it allows us to draw comparisons and correlations to human function, structure, behaviour etc. However, that is because when it comes to the rest of the body, we can compare because we know the how and why of the rest of the organs through physiology and pharmacology. We can deduce how similar or different our glucose metabolism process is to rats because we know how it works in us, and can also then look for it in them. The case of cognition is different. With the other mind’s problem and the hard problem, we don’t know if another mind is cognising, if it’s the same across individuals and how qualia happens. Thus, it is not only that we have nothing to compare to assuming we can find out any of that about another species, what exactly are we even looking for in other species when we have no idea of it in ourselves? Also, how are they choosing what cognitive traits or tasks to test? Different species have unique and varying adaptive and learnt behaviours so if these traits aren’t controls in the studies then how can their evolution be studied? Additionally, what do they gain by learning one species performs better at one task than the other? It surely cannot conclude that one is cognitively superior than the other? Like the asking the fish to climb a tree analogy. The article also perpetuates reference to correlation however the question of cognitive science is to answer causation. Thus, I think the paper overhypes the current and potential abilities of comparative psychology to explain cognitive evolution.
ReplyDelete"The last two questions of phylogeny and function address how, when, and why a cognitive trait evolved, are intractable without phylogenetic comparative perspective and have historically been the most challenging for comparative psychologists to pursue.- We cannot test why certain lineages- including humans-have evolved the cognitive abilities they possess"
ReplyDeleteThis disconnect between the first questions of ontogeny and causal mechanisms and the last questions of phylogeny and function is not unlike the disconnect between the where and when from the why and how of cognition. For example, although the discovery of mirror neurons was interesting for the field of cognitive science, it does not necessarily bring us any closer to understand why we have mirror neurons or how they operate in our neural systems. I believe the breach between the two categories can also be compared to the easy and hard problems of consciousness in the way that questions relating to function and doing are easily mapped, while questions related to feeling and experience may not be so easily pinned down. Said a different way, the where and when may be functionally definable, while the how and why may be less so.
"Analysis of anatomical proxies for cognition allow researchers to analyze large comparative datasets, they rely on the assumption that cognition is a one-dimensional, general-purpose mechanisms that varies only quantitatively."
This quote is really telling. I feel like in any comparative study across different groups there is a certain amount of standardization that goes on so that data sets can be compared in a conducive way. That being said, the assumption that cognition is a one-dimensional mechanism that can only be measured in terms of amount is clearly incorrect. To measure cognition in this way, though it may give researchers data on the slice of cognitive measures they choose to quantify, will not and should not be generalized into results about different species' general "level" of cognition.
In addition, the article mentions that most comparative studies most often provide on a single comparison point (N=1), and that this makes it difficult to generalize results across species. This contributes to the precarious nature of publishing results about a species' "level" of cognition. With only one comparison point, it is very hard to place a species in the great taxonomy, and once again their level of cognition could be undervalued and underrepresented to the general public reading the research findings.
I don't think cognition is a linear quantity and should therefore not be measured as such. Furthermore, it is dangerous to make general claims about a species' "level" of cognition because species deemed less cognitively active can often become subject to maltreatment, increased animal testing and worse conditions. With such high stakes, I completely disagree with cognition being measured in this way.
I think that phylogenetic comparative methods will produce more reliable results in explaining cognition compared to the findings that were found in the Confer et al. reading. The authors imply that it is important for us to study the other species related to us because we come from the same origin. The hope of these methods is to be able to find out about our own cognition through these studies. Although phylogenetic comparative psychology provides optimistic anticipation of what we might discover about species differences in cognition, I don’t think that it is sufficient enough to lead us to a conclusive explanation of human cognition.
ReplyDeleteThe authors describe that in comparative studies, each task will have to be compatible with diverse species. But wouldn’t this set boundaries on what can be tested? It would also restrict the difficulty of the task. We wouldn’t be able to alter these to better fit each species because then comparing across species would be meaningless. I think that this is the downfall to the phylogenetic comparative methods, and it would be impossible to test the limits of what we are cognitively capable of.
I question the the social intelligence hypothesis as a “guiding framework” for comparative studies of cognitive flexibility in primates. It leans towards regarding man as the most central species and constructs an ideal human mind and human social life as a model of comparison. By using an idealized human model, we regard the social interactions of other primates positively or negatively depending on how they compare to our complex social structures. It does not represent the social structures of other primates respective of their social worlds. Instead of relying on an anthropomorphic social intelligence hypothesis as a guide, we should steer clear of comparative studies and focus on methods that take into account multiple measures of cognition, irrespective of how the cognition of other species compares to human cognition.
ReplyDeleteI think there are some important points to take into consideration when evaluating the merits of the social intelligence hypothesis as a basis for comparative studies about cognitive flexibility.
Delete“I question the the social intelligence hypothesis as a “guiding framework” for comparative studies of cognitive flexibility in primates. It leans towards regarding man as the most central species and constructs an ideal human mind and human social life as a model of comparison.”
Firstly–and this is ostensibly true of all theories of comparative psychology–we generally adopt an anthrocentric view because we are the species of interest. In looking for evolutionary explanations of human cognition and behaviour, (in the case of comparative psychology) we examine how they differ from those of other species, and how those differences relate to phylogenetic distance.
In relation to the first point, comparative studies in primates about cognitive flexibility are useful precisely because there’s a lot of genetic and behavioural overlap between the various species. There’s a clear socialization component common to the behaviour of most (all?) primae species. They also show superior cognitive ability compared to some other groups of species, suggesting that social ability and cognitive ability may be linked.
“By using an idealized human model, we regard the social interactions of other primates positively or negatively depending on how they compare to our complex social structures. It does not represent the social structures of other primates respective of their social worlds.”
I don’t think that the social intelligence hypothesis assumes that apes have identical social structures to our own. We know that displays of aggression as well as mating and dominance practices are quite different than what we would accept in civilized society. Nor does comparative psychology seek to make qualitative judgements about their behaviour (it’s not saying that what chimps do is good or bad). I think what’s important here is that it’s a basis for cognitive flexibility. So the particular rules of a social hierarchy aren’t as important as the fact that the rules exist in the first place. I.e. the more complex your social life is, the more you have to be able to adjust how you think about the world, regardless of what the rules are.
I think you’re right that the relationship between the social intelligence hypothesis and cognitive flexibility is still somewhat tenuous though (until more conclusive evidence emerges). As described in the article, interspecies comparisons have only been pairwise, and no comprehensive study comparing multiple species has yet been conducted (according to the article). This means the trend across all primate species hasn’t actually been observed.
Another problem you allude to is that the measures of cognitive ability seem to measure different facets of cognition for different pairs of species. This is problematic. It’s quite conceivable that individual species might show marked strengths on particular cognitive abilities, which wouldn’t be borne out by a general test of cognitive ability. If only disparate measures of cognition are taken into account, the strength of the evidence becomes diluted. What are these comparisons showing in aggregate, if they all are looking at different things?
“With this estimate of the ancestral state, we can now consider why some species have strongly diverged from this ancestral state—such as Macaca fascicularis, Pongo pygmaeus, and Pan troglodytes—whereas others have not. Essentially, the ancestral state gives us a baseline by which to judge how divergent any extant species is from an ancestral state when further testing evolutionary hypotheses.”
ReplyDeleteWith the new phylogenetic methods we are able to learn the cognitive state of the ancestral species, thus it enables us to have a better understanding of the current species and the evolutionary processes. However, I am not sure how much the difference in divergences would tell us about the species’ cognitive capabilities. One possible reason that I can think of is the change in environment – the species would diverge more from its ancestral state if it had experienced bigger changes and had borne more selection pressures. Looking at the ancestral state is helpful for the area of Comparative Psychology, but I don’t think that comparing the divergences among the species will contribute much to the revolution of animals’ cognition. In addition, the paper lacks some details on explaining the scientific background of the reconstruction techniques, which makes the method less convincing to me.
The idea of a phylogenetic comparative psychology is an intriguing idea and a concept that I’ve definitely never heard of before. To find contrasting differences between similar species and to collaborate amongst researchers to create a sort of evolutionary tree for cognition does seem like an idea, that if implemented properly, could revolutionize the way we understand cognition and how it comes to evolve amongst living things. However, I do acknowledge that there are drawbacks to this method in that there is always a bias towards ourselves as species due to our vastly stronger understanding of ourselves rather than other species. In terms of reconstructing ancestral states of cognition, I am not sure if I understood it correctly, but it seeks to to measure traits of extinct species to better understand the general evolution of cognition. What I could not understand (or I guess my question is) how would these reconstructions occur? Do we have the methodology or technology to accomplish these recreations?
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