Hot answers tagged animal-cognition
11
Sure. For example, working memory can be assessed using the delayed match to sample task. Here are examples from monkeys, rats, pigeons, and bees.
The problem with comparing them is that the actual stimuli used for each species are different (e.g. odors for bees, shapes for monkeys) and this is known to affect the results.
In humans, if you run similar ...
10
With whales in particular, they don't even have arms or legs, so I wouldn't expect them to have large regions of the brain devoted to, say, fine-motor skills.
Ah, but they also have a complete three dimensions to move in, unlike us humans who only have about 2.5 dimensions to move in. Also, they have a number of different "limbs": tail, multiple fins, ...
9
I wouldn't worry about "running out" of room in our brain. We often forget things just because we don't need to know them, similar to . There are plenty of human savants that display apparently "unlimited" capacities of certain forms of memory, such as Hyperthymesia where one has a seemingly perfect amount of recall of autobiographical details (not to be ...
9
For instance, the same behavior was also shown in orang-utan and dog. Already two years after the study by Skinner (1947) mentioned in the news article, Kellogg (1949) gave a review of some of the experimental results, but advocates a less anthropomorphic interpretation:
Kellogg, W. N. (1949) 'Superstitious' behavior in animals. Psychological Review, Vol ...
8
The interface between the brain and the hand is not like a USB computer port, and we don't unplug the biological arm and plug in a mechanical one instead. We implant electrodes to just a tiny fraction of the neurons in M1 (about a hundred, out of millions), and use their signals to control the mechanical arm.
So the answer is yes. The monkeys don't lose any ...
7
Sure, visual working memory capacity has been assessed in humans, chimps and mac using a change-detection tasks and trail-making tasks.
For example, the chimp Ayumu at Kyoto University easily outperforms all humans and a simple number sequencing task. In the task, the numbers 1-n appear briefly on the screen in random positions and then the numbers must be ...
6
First, the concept of optimality of a learning curve is not well defined. You can measure at least 3 different aspects of learning:
Speed of learning
Time before extinction
Performance at peak
Of course, there may be other measures as well, and any combination of such measure may also be a legitimate measure for certain uses.
Conditioned Taste Aversion ...
5
The conclusions drawn in Inoue & Matsuzawa's (2007) study, which seems to be available here, are suspect. First off, the sample sizes (6 chimp, 9 human subjects) are simply too small to draw good inferences about working memory, at least about human working memory, but as I imagine chimps are somewhat expensive subjects, c'est la vie.
Secondly, and more ...
5
High working memory is associated with greater ability to learn meanings of abstract symbols, such as is required to do mathematics. I would be highly skeptical of a claim that there is a trade-off between WM and general intelligence.
Ian M. Lyons, Sian L. Beilock, Beyond quantity: Individual differences
in working memory and the ordinal understanding ...
5
No. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions, and the brain would not spontaneously reorganize based only on a improved WM.
Memory is a huge factor in intelligence, and improving WM would likely result in increased scores on intelligent tests, and in general is a good thing.
References:
Increased prefrontal and parietal ...
5
But what about a human empathizing with less humanoid animals?
Empathic responding towards humans is generalized to other species. The greater the similarity of the species towards humans, the larger is the empathic response. The findings support the notion that there is a relationship between human empathy directed towards other humans and human ...
5
Yes. See contra-freeloading or (for humans) ikea effect.
Contrafreeloading: (verb) The behavior in which animals offered the choice between eating food provided to them for free or working to get that food would eat the most food from the source that required effort. This term was created in 1963 by animal psychologist Glen Jensen. Jensen ran a study on ...
4
It seems that it is still a matter of debate whether animals are capable of mind wandering. For instance, there are a lot of publications about foresight, a future directed instance of mind wandering. Much of it comes from one group, e.g.,
Suddendorf T, Corballis MC. (2007) The evolution of foresight: What is
mental time travel, and is it unique to ...
3
This is indeed possible, but I haven't seen it done experimentally for reasons other than feasibility. Namely, since the exact same signal controls both arms, the amount of interesting learning to be had is significantly less than if the signal controls only one arm (e.g. tries to learn to pick up a banana with the mech arm whilst his real arm whacks him in ...
3
I think what is happening is a balance of evolutionary cost and resource cost.
Evolutionary cost is the amount of "effort" that natural selection spends refining a feature. Effort that could be spent refining other features, such as making it a more efficient swimmer, etc....so it is by no means free. If you can get the same capabilities with less ...
2
The obvious: animals use a variety of senses
There's a wikipedia article on intra-species recognition. The article states:
Different species may employ different methods, but all of them are
based on one or more senses (after all, this is how the organism
gather information about the environment). The recognition may happen
by chemical signature ...
2
Theoretically at least, yes, it is entirely doable.
In the central nervous system including the brain, sensation, decision and reaction form a feedback loop comprising of different types of nerves. Afferent neurons sense an input such as an external stimulus, interneurons are the connectors in the local circuit, while efferent neurons carry motor signals ...
1
The answer hinges on the definition of working memory. If we look at synthetics, with their massive visual memory correlations to time, numbers, etc, definitely not. They are worse in mathematics, they are constantly bombarded by memories triggered by unrelated events, some synethesiacs with OCD revolving around their personal lives are constantly ...
1
It looks like there is a developmental relationship between WM and general IQ:
Fry, A. F., & Hale, S. (1996). Processing speed, working memory, and fluid intelligence: Evidence for a developmental cascade. Psychological science, 7(4), 237-241.
Cole, M. W., Yarkoni, T., Repovš, G., Anticevic, A., & Braver, T. S. (2012). Global Connectivity of ...
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