Corey Hammer

emphryio:

1)This is a debate about consciousness, not "thinking."

2)It depends on what you mean by "think." If you mean information processing, then animals "think."

Instinct is usually defined as non-learned, inborn behaviors (e.g., the grasping reflex of human newborns).

Your first statement is contradictory to the other two. Your first statement is also in tune with the (disproven) thinking of the late 19th century determinists. Instincts can be trumped by learned behaviors.

Instincts are not mysterious. They can be studies scientifically. I suggest picking a text that deal with ethology (a basic college biology text should be a good start).

A) What is that?

B) Why? Otherwise, you're simply asserting.

Corey Hammer

John Page:

That might have been one of the early cognitive theories. However, we do not have an internal reward system for thinking. In fact, thinking is not the right word either.

Marduk

"1)This is a debate about consciousness, not "thinking.""

Is there a difference between consciousness and thinking?

Corey Hammer

Thinking is not a scientific definition. If, by thinking, you mean information processing, then the thread is most definitely not about thinking. Most information processing occurs nonconsciously. If by thinking, you mean processing regarding stimuli like goals, choice structures, etc., then we are talking about consciousness. However, thinking is too broad of a word and must be operationalized for specificity, especially since I'm in the camp of psychologists that throws all information processing into the term, "thinking."

ksagnostic

Sorry it took me awhile to get back to you. In a kind of sad irony, I had other family business to take care of, including putting our older dog to sleep.


[quote]<strong>Corey (responding to my quip about being busy): I'm talking about base rate, not actual numbers. Out of 280 million in the U.S. alone, I can imagine that it's a least a hundred thousand or so who have this disability. </strong>[QUOTE]

That's probably about right. This section of the population is increasing somewhat, simply because more people with this degree of disability are surviving more than they used to. BTW, personal point of clarification: I did not mean to indicate that the majority of my caseload functionally remain in the sensorimotor stage. Even the majority of my students who do not have functional speech are well beyond this level. But, I have always had three or four on my caseload who do qualify, and in my previous job I had more.

Citations follow. I got these from Pub Med. I will indicate by asterick those articles I have read in their entirity. The others, I read the abstracts provided through Pub Med. Sometime, when I have a lot more time than I have now, I may order those and read them as well.

*Herman, L.M., Richards, D.G., and Woltz, J.P. (1984) Comprehension of Sentences by Bottlenose Dolphins, Cognition, 16, 129-219

<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=654065 2&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=654065 2&dopt=Abstract</a>

(no abstract provided by Pub Med, but of course the article can be ordered)(I have this somewhere in my stack of papers, but I couldn't find it)

Herman, L.M., and Forestell, P.H. (1985) Reporting presence or absence of named objects by a language-trained dolphin. Neuroscience Biobehavior Review, 9, 667-681


<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=408028 4&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=408028 4&dopt=Abstract</a>

Herman, L.M., Morrel-Samuels, P., and Pack, A.A. (1990) Bottlenosed dolphins and Human Recognition of Veridical and Degraded Video Displays of an Artificial Gestural Language. Journal of Experimental Psychology Gen 119, 215-230

<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=214135 4&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=214135 4&dopt=Abstract</a>

Tschudin, A., Call, J., Dunbar, R.I., Harris, G., and van der Elst, C. (2001), Comprehension of signs by dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115, 100-105

*Schusterman, RJ, and Krieger, K. (1986) Artificial language comprehension and size transposition by a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 100, 348-355.

<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=380277 9&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=380277 9&dopt=Abstract</a>

Note that the claims here (with the exception of the Tschudin et. al. article, I included that as a bonus) is that the animals (dolphins and sea lions) were required to respond to combinations of gestural signs representing nouns, adjectives, and verbs, that the animals responded correctly to such combinations, and that the animals responded to initial gesture combinational utterances correctly. If the animals were respondng to single gestures, or even a limited set of two gestures in a very simple pivot grammar, I'd buy simple instrumental or operant conditioning. But the articles here refer to animals responding differently to combinations of gestures corresponding to subject nouns, verbs, adjectives, and object nouns. Unless the animals were responding semiotically to additional and different cues (the Rosanne Rosanna Danna explanation reliably employed by Thomas and Jean Umiker-Soebock), I think you have a rough road to hoe. Herman and his collegues did try to control for at least eye gaze cues by covering the eyes of the individual who provided the gestures.

I included both of these quotes together, since we are referring to Wernicke’s and Broca’s Areas here. First of all, it is important to remember that these “areas” were discovered by correlating cerebral damage to language function. The neuroanatomical correlates, such as the plenum temporale for Wernicke’s area, were discovered later. I believe it took a combination of functional MRI and PET scans to discover the correlates in great apes. Thus, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas do not really stand out all that much in neuroanatomy, including human neuroanatomy. I do concede that I worded my point on left hemisphere removal patients badly. However, I might ask you to think about this for a second. Presumably, these people do not have Wernicke’s and Broca’s “areas” in their right hemispheres before the procedure (that still relatively small proportion of lefties who have right hemisphere based language to the contrary), but they acquire it AFTER the procedure. Why should one presume that non-human animals, particularly large brained mammals with temporal and frontal lobes, would not be capable of doing the same thing if they are challenged with a semantic and syntactic system such as an artificial language?

Also, quick point. I tend to think that the reason why the subjects of animal language experiments don’t construct “novel” grammatical statements to the satisfaction of strong innatist linguists has more to do with the output system (such as graphical aided systems and manual sign approximations), perhaps combined with substantially shorter developmental periods, than the lack of brain areas indentified ex post facto. In fact, the majority of my students who use non-speech systems tend to have extremely simple expressive syntax, even when they can easily comprehend complex utterances from others. The reason for this is that complex utterances using a picture board, for example, are just not very economical.

Or, it may indicate problems with the species understanding of the concept of chatting on the Internet, or boredom. The problem with Patterson is that she really doesn’t let Koko speak for herself, she’s always there with the most generous and complex explanation of what Koko does. Koko appears to scratch her nose and Patterson is immediately there telling you that she is saying “stink”, but worse, going into a complicated motivational history of why she would sign “stink” at that particular time.

Well, I was being grumpy. Remember this was anecdotal, and so there were other possible explanations. However, in my generous explanation, then it may very well have been a form of instrumental conditioning, but she picked out the phonemic structure “walk” across contexts. I would not, of course, expect a dog to understand context. However, I have heard and read psychologists and psycholinguists claim (so far as I can tell, an uninvestigated claim) that dogs simply respond to specific combinations of sound and intonation. The response generalization my dog might have done would not be expected under those circumstances.
Oh yes. In fact, the “Clever Hans Phenomenon” is an occupational hazard in my field. For example, I have had to refer to it when explaining to people why I don’t use facilitated communication.
Regarding my reference to dogs and intentional communication ala’ Elizabeth Bates, I am not aware of much direct research connecting the two. However, the behavior of dogs is very consistent with what she, her associates, and those who have followed in her footsteps call markers of “intentional” communication (e.g., dual focus-where the communicator alternates eye gaze between a desired object and the communicative partner-something that dogs do routinely). In my field, particularly when working with people who have profound developmental disabilities (those who really do appear to be functioning at the sensorimotor stage, for instance), we tend to use “Batesian” criteria for assessing whether people are intentional communicators. I did come across in Pub Med (“Comprehension of human communicative signs in pet dogs [Canis familiaris]” by Soproni, Mikolosi, Topal, and Csanyi in The Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2001, 122-126) the abstract of a very interesting study where dogs were reported to perform comparatively to human children on following human directional cues and better than laboratory chimpanzees (this was a replication of a study by Daniel Povinelli). I find this interesting because when I read Povinelli’s study, my response was that I thought that ordinary family dogs would have performed better on his tests than his chimpanzees did. It appears that it occurred to someone else as well. Still, I will need to read the entire article to evaluate the study these guys did.

John Page

I stand corrected on "thinking", likely equally unscientific but lets consider rewards for "the brain doing useful stuff".

My interest in this stems from another thread where we're debating free will and how choices get made. I'm proposing that our environment effectively trains us (perhaps like an owner trains its dog?) and thus optimizes our behavior in that environment. For my theory to work I obviously need a reward mechanism that either a) tells the brain it thunk well and/or b) that it should keep on thinking. I guess a punishment system could be around but I'm thinking happy here.

After your posting, I did a little research and quickly focused on dopamine and the fact that cocaine and morphine act as natural neural transmitters. Could the pleasure of crack users be the same thing that rewards us for appropriate information processing? I also did some straight Internet searches and the best I came up with was this link - <a href="http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/articles/behavior/rewards_1/" target="_blank">Brain Reward System</a>.

If I've got this wrong please let me know.

Woof Woof!

[ April 04, 2002: Message edited by: John Page ]</p>

Boro Nut

On reflection, I would have to say a definite no. I don't claim to be an authority on the subject, and you must understand that at most this is just my best educated guess, but I do think most people would support my opinion that it is highly unlikely your dog is actually conscious, based on a number of factors:-

1 - The nominal size of dogs, and the actual size and age of your dog in particular.

2 - The small relative cranial capacity in relation to overall size of dogs in general, and your dog in particular.

3 - The speed my car was travelling.

Boro Nut

Boro Nut

Certainly there is a difference. I once stole ten bob from my Mam's purse. I knew she needed it for fags, but I still stole it and spent it all on chocolate.

I was tossing and turning all night while a little voice said "You have stolen from your own mother, how could you? She is sure to find out and then you will be sorry". That is an example of my conscience.

The following morning, I gave the remaining few crumbs of chocolate to my baby brother and told my mother he had stolen the ten bob before she even noticed it had gone. That is an example of me thinking.

Boro Nut

Ierrellus

Good discussion!

One scientist humorously stated that animals have only four things on their "minds"--the four Fs--feeding, fighting, fleeing and sexual intercourse. I used to lie under a medium-sized shade tree after work and listen to the birds. They had definitely different sound patterns for what they were expressing. I learned to imitate the clicking sound that meant (preditor around or in our language the cat is around} and get the birds agitated.

My favorite joke is about a little old lady, lying on her lawn chaise, sipping a cool drink, listening to the birds and saying to herself, "What melodious warblings. How soothing! God's in his Heaven; all's right with the world." The birds are saying, "We're horny! Come and get it!"

I agree with Mageth. The dog never read Piaget.

Ierrellus

[ April 09, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]

[ April 09, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

Marduk

"One scientist humorously stated that animals have only four things on their "minds"--the four Fs--feeding, fighting, fleeing and sexual intercourse."

You forgot the most important thing on my dogs mind. Sleeping!
(not to mention pestering me to rub his belly)