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Do some Animals, aside from Humans, think?

quarky said:
we are in no position to test intelligence, much less if we are the only species that thinks.
We don't even have a real definition of thought.

Fortunately, for other organisms, our superior intelligence and sole ability for thought, will soon remove us from the evolutionary history.
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Okey dokey, this is science not R&P, um look up number line testing and problems solving.

While I agree that the destruction of habitat and species is a problem, testing for cognitive skills is what it is. I suggest you google the term 'behaviorism'.

As to 'real defintion of thought' , you are out of the ball park and not even in the city.
 
Normal Dude said:
Look up cognitive psychology.
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Um, there is still notan neurophysiological definition beyond something like 'assumed interaction of neural networks'.

Not a very good argument. The fact that there is cognitive neuroscience does not mean that 'thought' is well defined. Most people mistake verbal cognition for thought.
 
eir_de_scania said:
They communicate with us all the time. Body language, mostly.

Animals think? I'm certain they do. But animals live here and now, they don't worry about tomorrow or regret yesterday.
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There is some evidence that some great apes seem to plan.

(Finding a high value foodstuffand "nonchalantly" covering it up, then returning when no other chimps/bonobos(?) were around)
 
My dog can figure out how to get treats hidden in unusual locations, including via indirect means. (For example, exiting the current room, travelling through two other rooms, and coming around the rear.) She taught herself how to open a doorknob. My previous dog taught himself how to turn on the television remote, among other tricks, and did so for his own entertainment.

She has a vocabulary of ... meh, call it under a hundred words. "Where's Mommy?" will get a different response from "Where's Daddy?", and Mom can be in a place not easily trackable by smell, and still will be found. "Uncle's coming over later." will get the dog to rush to the window overlooking the driveway.

... not so good on telling time, no, but evidence of thought processes, yes.
 
I bewildered as to why anyone would arrive at the idea that animals don't think. Of course they think. Why would anyone think otherwise? Obviously, other animals are less intelligent than humans (by our typical definition of intelligence) and it is clear that the capacity for abstract thought diminishes with brain size and complexity ultimately to a vanishing point, but it is nonsensical to suppose there is some quantum difference between human brain function and that of other animals. You can thank religion, I would guess, for this ridiculous idea that humans are of another order of being compared to all other life.
 
Normal Dude said:
I'd like to hear exactly why you believe we cannot test intelligence or the ability to think. From the neuropsychology perspective, there is a definition of thought. Look it up.

I don't think you have any clue what you are talking about, and are simply using this thread to get on your soapbox about the evils of humanity. Even a simple search would show that quite a bit of thought has been put into this (forgive the pun).

What the heck is this "we" stuff? Do you seriously think this applies to everyone?

By the way, I would still like to know you arrived at the conclusion that apes behave like retarded children when put in school.

Oh,

Linky please.

By your definition of intelligence, the bubonic plague must have all been microscopic geniuses.
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I didn't mean to start a stink with my snide comments regarding our assumed role as the sole intelligence on the planet. Its a pet peeve, no pun intended.
Perhaps I should have said that great apes tested more like 3 year old kids than retarded humans...although retardation is often expressed in terms of cognitive abilities of immature humans.

Certainly, there is no shortage of tests that show problem solving abilities in non-humans. Crows and ravens show an uncanny ability to solve problems in a creative way, in spite of their tiny brains. With the great apes, we are liklier to anthropomorphisize the findings of various tests.

With cetaceans, its harder to do that, because they are so alien. We hardly know where to begin with an I.Q. test.
I was fortunate to observe some of the attempts at determining the intelligence of tursiops in the 70's (flipper sea school, Marathon, fl.)
In a sense, the results often showed that we weren't able to design a good test.

But never mind the smiling dolphin. What about the unsmiling spermwhale?
There's the largest brain on earth. And we are at a loss to study it, short of dissection. We have almost no clue what goes on in a whale brain.
 
Acleron said:
If the dogs seeing the demo of dog with ball in mouth intuit that it's easier to use their own mouth rather than a paw, why do the dogs seeing the demo without the ball not reach the same conclusion? From the results, the ball makes a difference but there may be a different explanation than that given.
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It seems that they presume the dog doing the modeling can't use it's mouth for some reason... that the paw is required... but when she has the ball in her mouth they appear to think she would have used her mouth if the ball wasn't in it, and they use their mouth rather than her paw. What other explanation are you thinking it could be?
 
There is an article on primate language in the latest Skeptic magazine. "Aping Language" by Clive Wynne, vol. 13, no. 4, 2008 pp. 10-14.

I am not much interested in this subject, so I have not read it.
 
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articulett said:
It seems that they presume the dog doing the modeling can't use it's mouth for some reason... that the paw is required... but when she has the ball in her mouth they appear to think she would have used her mouth if the ball wasn't in it, and they use their mouth rather than her paw. What other explanation are you thinking it could be?
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Their hypothesis explains the effects of seeing a demo of a dog with a ball in its mouth. It just surprises me that having that level of intelligence, the dogs seeing a no-ball demo didn't just use their mouths. After all, given a choice, dogs usually use their mouths, lips, teeth and tongues for manipulation more than their paws.

Having re-read your link (ie having really read it :o) I realised it says 'almost all' for each group, my first impression was that it was a 100% switch in behaviours. Perhaps a closer look at the figures will convince me.
 
Ziggurat said:
Animals can definitely have a vocabulary. Parots, for example, are definitely "speaking", some with impressively large vocabularies. But what they don't seem to be able to do is form a grammar. Individual words can mean things to them, and even strings of words can mean things, but as a set phrase which acts like one big word. The human capacity for grammar seems to be unique.
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Unless they are trained to speak like the now sadly deceased Alex.

http://www.alexfoundation.org/index.htm
 
I assume that all animals think and their behaviour seems to be strongly suggestive of this.

The only question, for me, is how close their mental processes are to ours.

Do they have a sense of self?
Can they think in an abstract way?

Mirror self-recognition is a way of establishing whether an animal understand that is has a 'self'. It is very rare in the animal world, apparently, and has so far been observed only in humans, apes, dolphins and elephants.

Here's a link to Joshua Plotnik's fascinating paper on elephant MSR.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/060...ts&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
 
billydkid said:
I bewildered as to why anyone would arrive at the idea that animals don't think. Of course they think. Why would anyone think otherwise?
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That's because they put Descartes before the horse.


... I'll get my coat...
 
quarky said:
I didn't mean to start a stink with my snide comments regarding our assumed role as the sole intelligence on the planet. Its a pet peeve, no pun intended.
Perhaps I should have said that great apes tested more like 3 year old kids than retarded humans...although retardation is often expressed in terms of cognitive abilities of immature humans.

Certainly, there is no shortage of tests that show problem solving abilities in non-humans. Crows and ravens show an uncanny ability to solve problems in a creative way, in spite of their tiny brains. With the great apes, we are liklier to anthropomorphisize the findings of various tests.

With cetaceans, its harder to do that, because they are so alien. We hardly know where to begin with an I.Q. test.
I was fortunate to observe some of the attempts at determining the intelligence of tursiops in the 70's (flipper sea school, Marathon, fl.)
In a sense, the results often showed that we weren't able to design a good test.

But never mind the smiling dolphin. What about the unsmiling spermwhale?
There's the largest brain on earth. And we are at a loss to study it, short of dissection. We have almost no clue what goes on in a whale brain.
Click to expand...


It ain't the size it is the cortical organizations. Birds are very smart and have color vision. I would assume so are many sea mammals, smart not color vision.
 
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e-sabbath said:
My dog can figure out how to get treats hidden in unusual locations, including via indirect means. (For example, exiting the current room, travelling through two other rooms, and coming around the rear.) She taught herself how to open a doorknob. My previous dog taught himself how to turn on the television remote, among other tricks, and did so for his own entertainment.

She has a vocabulary of ... meh, call it under a hundred words. "Where's Mommy?" will get a different response from "Where's Daddy?", and Mom can be in a place not easily trackable by smell, and still will be found. "Uncle's coming over later." will get the dog to rush to the window overlooking the driveway.

... not so good on telling time, no, but evidence of thought processes, yes.
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We have two border collies, and I have no doubt that they can think. As far as I can tell, though, their way of thinking differs from ours in two respects:

1. Their working memory (analogous to L1 or L2 cache in a computer) is smaller than ours, so they aren't good at solving problems that rely on working backwards from steps they just took. This explains why dogs seem incredibly stupid when they can't figure out how to unwind their leash from the tree they just wrapped themselved around.

2. They don't do deep processing, meaning that they take each situation as it is rather than interpreting it and extrapolating based on past experience. This is why, when I teach a dog to sit, the task "sit in the living room" is different from the task "sit in the back yard". They don't generalize well. This ability in humans is probably what allowed us to develop language.

Speaking of communication, it's a common misconception that dogs communicate verbally, as we do. They do SOME verbal communication, but it's really only needed when the dogs can't see each other. They have an enormous body-language vocabulary. For instance, the old saying "dogs can smell fear" actually arises from the dog's tendency to analyze our body language, often misinterpreting it because our body language is different from theirs. When we are afraid of a dog, it usually shows up in our body language in the form of stiff, deliberate movement. In dog language, stiffness is a sign that a dog is getting ready to attack. Naturally, this upsets the other dog, and he goes on the offensive.
 
Actually, my Standard Poodle is _pretty_ good at working backwards. One of the great differences between that breed and Border Collies, I think. Border Collies are better at actually solving puzzles, Poodles can, if so inclined, figure out what they just did wrong.

... they're not inclined that often.
 
I don't know if dolphins have language in any way that would satisfy linguists but there is no reason to think that animals can't think. They can learn and if they can then they think.
 
Planaria can learn simple mazes {operant conditioning) and show classical conditioning. I have a video of a goldfish I trained to perform a chain of responses to get food (swim through hoop ->press lever -> food delivered). Would you consider this evidence that they think?
 
Jeff Corey said:
Planaria can learn simple mazes {operant conditioning) and show classical conditioning. I have a video of a goldfish I trained to perform a chain of responses to get food (swim through hoop ->press lever -> food delivered). Would you consider this evidence that they think?
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In my mind that would qualify as a basic thought process =thinking
edited to add thinking
 
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