16.+Animal+Cognition

April 17, 2015
 * 16. Animal Cognition**

Why don't all animals have big brains? Roth & Dicke 2005: The human brain vs. animal brains Are our brains special in other ways?
 * Brain Evolution**
 * Experiment: Fruit flies given access to 2 foods: oranges and pineapples (pineapples contained odorless quinine, which made the flies sick)
 * After 3 days of exposure, the "smart" flies learned to eat the orange.
 * Collected the "smart" eggs from the orange and the "dumb" eggs from the pineapple.
 * After 12 generations of "evolution" (smart flies bred with smart flies, dumb flies bred with dumb flies)
 * When they were mixed together, the smart ones died off while the dumb ones survived.
 * Why: Neural material is costly--supporting it requires too many calories.
 * For example, the human brain accounts for about 2% of the adult body weight, yet it consumes about 20% of metabolic energy at rest. In infants it can be up to 50%
 * Human evolution comprised:[[image:1.png width="271" height="198" align="right"]]
 * Brain grew
 * Gut shrank
 * Eating high-calorie foods (like meat) made this possible
 * Human brain size has doubled in last 2 million years
 * Humans do not have the largest brain or cortex in absolute or relative terms.
 * Humans have the largest number of cortical neurons.
 * Due to high conduction velocity and smaller distances between neurons, the human cortex probably has the greatest information processing capacity
 * Vertebrate brains share a basic organization [[image:3.png width="258" height="189" align="right"]]
 * Language
 * Human language regions (Broca's and Wernicke's areas) are left lateralized in both humans and chimpanzees (slightly in macaque)
 * But only in humans, Broca's area (frontal lobe) is strongly connected to Wernicke's area (temporal lobe)

Homing pigeons can sense the earth's magnetic field using structures in their beaks that contain iron Dolphins and bats use echolocation Sharks (especially hammerheads) can sense electricity (electroreception), so it can sense when fish contracts its muscles Dogs' sense of smell is 10,000-100,000 times better than ours.
 * Perception**
 * Vision analogy: What we can see accurately from 100 yards away a dog would see equally well from 500 miles away.
 * Olfactory receptors in the nose
 * Dogs have 300 million
 * Humans have 6 million
 * Proportionally, a dog's brain dedicates 40 times as much space to smell as ours.
 * A species' cognitive abilities fits its needs

Why is it so hard to catch a fly?
 * Attention**
 * Critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) - CFF is where we stop seeing flicker and start seeing smooth video
 * Human CFF is about 60 Hz
 * Monitors, etc., refresh at 60 Hz
 * Varies among species:
 * European eel, 14 Hz
 * Human, 60 Hz
 * Dog, 80 Hz
 * Squirrels, 120 Hz
 * Fly, 250 Hz
 * Time Perception
 * Flies are like Neo in the matrix
 * Process perceptual information faster than we do
 * The world seems to move slower

Within species Between species
 * Social Cognition**
 * Extremely important for a lot of social species
 * Complex dominance hierarchies
 * Mating for life
 * Hare, Brown, Williamson, & Tomasello (2002): Put food in one container, See if the animal finds it on the first try.
 * [[image:dogvchimpanzee.png width="250" height="246" align="right"]]Experiment 1 - Human indicates where it is
 * reached toward baited container
 * gazed at it
 * marked it with a wood block
 * When done with dogs, dogs choose right 15/18 times. Chimanzees only get it 9/18 times
 * Experiment 2 - Dogs still performed better than wolves (both were raised with humans)
 * [[image:dogsvwolves.png width="205" height="196"]] (G = gaze, P = point T =tap)
 * Control: In a task that did not involve social cues and just involved working memory, dogs and wolves did about the same.
 * Even young puppies who were raised without much access to humans could do the gaze and point task where wolves and chimps failed.
 * Conclusion: during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways


 * Lit, Schweitzer, & Oberbauer (2011)
 * Participants - Drug and/or explosive detection dog/handler pairs
 * Procedure
 * Dog/handler teams enter room
 * Handler is (falsely) told that red paper marks bomb location
 * Does dog alert to that location? (correct response is to never alert)
 * 4 conditions:[[image:conditions.png width="266" height="199" align="right"]]
 * Null: no red paper, no slim jims (no human or scent influence)
 * Marked null: red construction paper taped to cabinet (human influence)
 * Unmarked Decoy: slim-jims and tennis balls (scent influence)
 * Marked Decony: red construction paper taped to cabinet + slim jims and tennis balls (both human and scent influence)
 * Result: Humans had a big influence and slim hims (scent) barely mattered
 * [[image:slimjim.png width="366" height="243"]]
 * Dog is very sensitive to what the human rinks.
 * Could be bad for detection
 * Note: no condition with actually bomb scent


 * Memory**
 * Before snow falls, a Clark's Nutcracker can cache food in more than 6,000 locations. It proceeds to remember their location 6 months later in a visually different world.
 * Great at spatial memory, mediocre at color memory.
 * Pinyon jays don't cache as much food, but caches many different foods.
 * Great at color memory, mediocre at spatial memory.
 * A species' cognitive abilities evolve to fit its needs.
 * Cognitive abilities are modular (a species can be good at A and bad at B, or vice versa)

Episodic Memory
 * Scrub Jays "cache" their food. They hide it and find it later.
 * They have to remember where it was. Do they remember what and when as well?
 * Clayton and Dickinson (1998)
 * They cache a nut, wait 120 hours, cache a worm, wait 4 hours, then recover
 * Both are still fresh and tasty. They recover the (yummier) worm
 * They cache a worm, wait 5 days, cache a nut, wait 4 hours, then recover
 * The worm is now decayed. They recover the nut.
 * Scrub Jays remember what, when, and where they cached

Hernstein 1979 - Pigeons can categorize trees vs. fish, Monet vs. Picasso, and Bach vs. Stravinsky
 * Categorization**
 * Evidence of complex concepts that are //perceptual//

Cheney & Seyfarth 1999 Numerical categories
 * Condition 1: Play eagle sound. Monkeys sound alarm. Wait 6 minutes. Play eagle call again and monkeys don't care.
 * Condition 2: Play the eagle sound. Monkeys sound alarm. Wait 6 minutes. Then play the sound of a monkey saying "eagle." Monkeys don't care.
 * Control: play eagle, wait 6 minutes, then play jaguar. Monkeys sound alarm both times.
 * Analysis: Animals form "functional categories"
 * e.g., "signal that there's an eagle in the area"
 * eagle call
 * monkey alarm call
 * They are not purely stimulus-based
 * Monkeys and numbers[[image:ignore size.png width="174" height="185" align="right"]]
 * Cantlon & Brannon 2006: Monkeys and humans had to choose the box with the smaller number from two choices. In order to get it right, they have to ignore things like size and just pay attention to number
 * Monkeys performed a little worse than humans, but their pattern of performance was very similar
 * [[image:monkeysvpeople.png width="464" height="238" align="right"]]
 * Monkeys can estimate two numerical quantities and do nonverbal arithmetic