A lot of folks are talking about that new study about dog learning. (Here's the New Scientist writeup and here's the Current Biology article) I found it pretty interesting in that it shows dogs can understand intentions, something once claimed only of humans.
When dogs learn new tricks, they do not simply copy what they see, but interpret it, suggests a new study, which provides evidence that man's best friend possesses a human-like ability to understand the goals and intentions of others.
In the experiment, a well-trained Border collie bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw. If she did this while carrying a toy ball between her teeth, the dogs in her audience would instead tug the lever with their mouths when their turn arrived. These animals appeared to be thinking that she used her paw only because her mouth held a ball, say researchers.
Of course we'd discussed issues related to this a lot last year in our cognitive science online reading which read Michael Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. One of the flaws of that book was that since it was written more and more animals were found to learn in more human-like ways. Although I'm not sure anyone expected dogs to fit.
The one interesting thing I took away from reading Tomasello was its relationship to Peirce. That is learning which is in terms of shared intents or the recognition of intents entails a kind of thirdness. (A logic requiring three elements) Typically until recent learning was thought to just involve secondness (two elements). Now I'd argued that most likely rather than humans developing a full ability to recognize intents it was probably gradual. Systems that used a two-place logic evolved to a three-place logic. What makes humans, human probably was that many systems so developed.
I think some of these animal studies are interesting precisely for this reason.
There's some anecdotal evidence that orcas also engage in selective imitation. I'm not sure anything's been published yet, but I know some people are doing that work right now.
That was published a couple of years ago. I read about it in New Scientist. (28 August 2005)
One study involved killer whales at Marineland in Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada. An inventive male devised a brand new way to catch birds, and passed the strategy on to his tank-mates. The 4-year-old orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish onto the water's surface. He waits below for a gull to grab the fish, then lunges at it with open jaws. "They are in a way setting a trap," says animal behaviourist Michael Noonan of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, who made the discovery, "They catch three or four gulls this way some days."
“The orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish into the water. He waits for a bird to grab the fish and then lunges” Noonan had never seen the behaviour before, despite three years of observations for separate experiments. But a few months after the enterprising male started doing it, Noonan spied the whale's younger half-brother doing the same thing. Soon the brothers' mothers were enjoying feathered snacks, as were a 6-month-old calf and an older male. Noonan presented the research this month at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah.
Wild dolphins off the west coast of Australia were the first marine mammals in which cultural learning was observed. They apparently learn from group-mates how to use sponges to protect their snouts while scavenging (New Scientist, 11 June, p 12). But the evidence from killer whales is much more conclusive because the process was observed from start to finish.
Wow that's really fascinating.
That's an interesting phenomenon, but I'm curious about the conclusion that "These animals appeared to be thinking that she used her paw only because her mouth held a ball, say researchers." Were the few dogs that didn't pull the lever with their mouths (after seeing the collie with the ball in her mouth) stupid? Did they misinterpret what they saw? Did they engage in an alternative thought process? I'm a bit uneasy about ascribing these predicates to dogs.
There's an incredible video that you can see on YouTube here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oxDZW4k8tCY
It shows a group of orcas, including some juveniles, sizing up a seal on a sheet of ice. After doing this for several minutes (the video only shows them doing it for a few), several of the orcas lined up and rushed the ice in unison, causing a large wave that knocked the seal off the ice. They played with it for a while, and then put the seal back on the ice and went through the process again. That's behavior that looks almost like teaching. Groups of orcas that beach themselves to catch seals also engage in behavior that looks like teaching.
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