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Tomasello, M., Hare, B., & Fogleman, T. (2001). The ontogeny of gaze following in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, and rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta. Anim. Behav., 61(2), 335–343.
Abstract: Primates follow the gaze direction of conspecifics to outside objects. We followed the ontogeny of this social-cognitive skill for two species: rhesus macaques and chimpanzees. In the first two experiments, using both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal design, we exposed individuals of different ages to a human looking in a specified direction. Rhesus infants first began reliably to follow the direction of this gaze at the end of the early infancy period, at about 5.5 months of age. Chimpanzees did not reliably follow human gaze until 3-4 years; this corresponds to the latter part of the late infancy period for this species. In the third experiment we exposed individuals of the same two species to a human repeatedly looking to the same location (with no special object at that location) to see if subjects would learn to ignore the looks. Only adults of the two species diminished their gaze-following behaviour over trials. This suggests that in the period between infancy and adulthood individuals of both species come to integrate their gaze-following skills with their more general social-cognitive knowledge about other animate beings and their behaviour, and so become able to deploy their gaze-following skills in a more flexible manner.
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Brauer, J., Kaminski, J., Riedel, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Making inferences about the location of hidden food: social dog, causal ape. J Comp Psychol, 120(1), 38–47.
Abstract: Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and great apes from the genus Pan were tested on a series of object choice tasks. In each task, the location of hidden food was indicated for subjects by some kind of communicative, behavioral, or physical cue. On the basis of differences in the ecologies of these 2 genera, as well as on previous research, the authors hypothesized that dogs should be especially skillful in using human communicative cues such as the pointing gesture, whereas apes should be especially skillful in using physical, causal cues such as food in a cup making noise when it is shaken. The overall pattern of performance by the 2 genera strongly supported this social-dog, causal-ape hypothesis. This result is discussed in terms of apes' adaptations for complex, extractive foraging and dogs' adaptations, during the domestication process, for cooperative communication with humans.
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B. Agnetta,, B. Hare,, & M. Tomasello,. (2000). Cues to food location that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) of different ages do and do not use. Anim. Cogn., 3(2), 107–112.
Abstract: Autoren
B. Agnetta, B. Hare, M. Tomasello
Zusammenfassung
The results of three experiments are reported. In the main study, a human experimenter presented domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) with a variety of social cues intended to indicate the location of hidden food. The novel findings of this study were: (1) dogs were able to use successfully several totally novel cues in which they watched a human place a marker in front of the target location; (2) dogs were unable to use the marker by itself with no behavioral cues (suggesting that some form of human behavior directed to the target location was a necessary part of the cue); and (3) there were no significant developments in dogs' skills in these tasks across the age range 4 months to 4 years (arguing against the necessity of extensive learning experiences with humans). In a follow-up study, dogs did not follow human gaze into “empty space” outside of the simulated foraging context. Finally, in a small pilot study, two arctic wolves (Canis lupus) were unable to use human cues to locate hidden food. These results suggest the possibility that domestic dogs have evolved an adaptive specialization for using human-produced directional cues in a goal-directed (especially foraging) context. Exactly how they understand these cues is still an open question.
Schlüsselwörter
Key words Dogs – Arctic wolves – Social cognition – Gaze following – Communication
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Miklosi, A., Pongracz, P., Lakatos, G., Topal, J., & Csanyi, V. (2005). A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs (Canis familiaris) and Humans and Cats (Felis catus) and Humans. J. Comp. Psychol., 119(2), 179–186.
Abstract: Dogs' (Canis familiaris) and cats' (Felis catus) interspecific communicative behavior toward humans was investigated. In Experiment 1, the ability of dogs and cats to use human pointing gestures in an object-choice task was compared using 4 types of pointing cues differing in distance between the signaled object and the end of the fingertip and in visibility duration of the given signal. Using these gestures, both dogs and cats were able to find the hidden food; there was no significant difference in their performance. In Experiment 2, the hidden food was made inaccessible to the subjects to determine whether they could indicate the place of the hidden food to a naive owner. Cats lacked some components of attention-getting behavior compared with dogs. The results suggest that individual familiarization with pointing gestures ensures high-level performance in the presence of such gestures; however, species-specific differences could cause differences in signaling toward the human.
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Grosenick, L., Clement, T. S., & Fernald, R. D. (2007). Fish can infer social rank by observation alone. Nature, 445(7126), 429–432.
Abstract: Transitive inference (TI) involves using known relationships to deduce unknown ones (for example, using A > B and B > C to infer A > C), and is thus essential to logical reasoning. First described as a developmental milestone in children, TI has since been reported in nonhuman primates, rats and birds. Still, how animals acquire and represent transitive relationships and why such abilities might have evolved remain open problems. Here we show that male fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) can successfully make inferences on a hierarchy implied by pairwise fights between rival males. These fish learned the implied hierarchy vicariously (as 'bystanders'), by watching fights between rivals arranged around them in separate tank units. Our findings show that fish use TI when trained on socially relevant stimuli, and that they can make such inferences by using indirect information alone. Further, these bystanders seem to have both spatial and featural representations related to rival abilities, which they can use to make correct inferences depending on what kind of information is available to them. Beyond extending TI to fish and experimentally demonstrating indirect TI learning in animals, these results indicate that a universal mechanism underlying TI is unlikely. Rather, animals probably use multiple domain-specific representations adapted to different social and ecological pressures that they encounter during the course of their natural lives.
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Nakamaru, M., & Sasaki, A. (2003). Can transitive inference evolve in animals playing the hawk-dove game? J. Theor. Biol., 222(4), 461–470.
Abstract: What should an individual do if there are no reliable cues to the strength of a competitor when fighting with it for resources? We herein examine the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in the hawk-dove game, if the opponent's resource-holding potential (RHP) can only indirectly be inferred from the outcome of past interactions in the population. The strategies we examined include the classical mixed strategy in which no information on past games is utilized, the `imprinting' strategy in which a player increases/decreases its aggressiveness if it wins/loses a game, the `immediate inference' strategy in which a player can infer the strength of those opponents it fought before, and the `transitive inference' strategy in which a player can infer the strength of a new opponent through a third party with which both players have fought before. Invasibility analysis for each pair of strategies revealed that (i) the transitive-inference strategy can always invade the mixed strategy and the imprinting strategy, and itself refuses invasion by these strategies; (ii) the largest advantage for transitive inference is achieved when the number of games played per individual in one generation is small and when the cost of losing an escalated game is large; (iii) the immediate inference, rather than the transitive inference, can be an ESS if the cost of fighting is small; (iv) a strong linear ranking is established in the population of transitive-inference strategists, though it does not perfectly correlate to the ranking by actual RHPs. We found that the advantage of the transitive inference is not in its ability to correct a misassessment (it is actually the worst in doing so), but in the ability of quickly lining up either incorrect or correct assessments to form a linear dominance hierarchy.
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Acuna, B. D., Sanes, J. N., & Donoghue, J. P. (2002). Cognitive mechanisms of transitive inference. Exp Brain Res, 146(1), 1–10.
Abstract: We examined how the brain organizes interrelated facts during learning and how the facts are subsequently manipulated in a transitive inference (TI) paradigm (e.g., if A<B and B<C, then A<C). This task determined features such as learned facts and behavioral goals, but the learned facts could be organized in any of several ways. For example, if one learns a list by operating on paired items, the pairs may be stored individually as separate facts and reaction time (RT) should decrease with learning. Alternatively, the pairs may be stored as a single, unified list, which may yield a different RT pattern. We characterized RT patterns that occurred as participants learned, by trial and error, the predetermined order of 11 shapes. The task goal was to choose the shape occurring closer to the end of the list, and feedback about correctness was provided during this phase. RT increased even as its variance decreased during learning, suggesting that the learnt knowledge became progressively unified into a single representation, requiring more time to manipulate as participants acquired relational knowledge. After learning, non-adjacent (NA) list items were presented to examine how participants reasoned in a TI task. The task goal also required choosing from each presented pair the item occurring closer to the list end, but without feedback. Participants could solve the TI problems by applying formal logic to the previously learnt pairs of adjacent items; alternatively, they could manipulate a single, unified representation of the list. Shorter RT occurred for NA pairs having more intervening items, supporting the hypothesis that humans employ unified mental representations during TI. The response pattern does not support mental logic solutions of applying inference rules sequentially, which would predict longer RT with more intervening items. We conclude that the brain organizes information in such a way that reflects the relations among the items, even if the facts were learned in an arbitrary order, and that this representation is subsequently used to make inferences.
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Quesada, J., Kintsch, W., & Gomez, E. (2005). Complex problem-solving: a field in search of a definition? Theor Issues Ergon Sci, 6(1), 5–33.
Abstract: Complex problem-solving (CPS) is as an area of cognitive science that has received a good amount of attention, but theories in the field have not progressed accordingly. The reasons could be the lack of good definitions and classifications of the tasks (taxonomies). Although complexity is a term used pervasively in psychology and is operationalized in different ways, there are no psychological theories of complexity. The definition of problem-solving has been changed in the past to reflect the varied interests of the researchers and has lost its initial concreteness. These two facts together make it difficult to define CPS or make clear if CPS should reuse the theory and methods of classical problem-solving or on the contrary should build a theoretical structure starting from scratch. A taxonomy is offered of tasks using both formal features and psychological features that are theory-independent that could help compare the CPS tasks used in the literature. The adequateness is also reviewed of the most extended definitions of CPS and conclude that they are in serious need of review, since they cover tasks that are not considered problem-solving by their own authors or are not complex, but ignore others that should clearly be included.
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BRYSON, J. O. A. N. N. A. J. EVIDENCE OF MODULARITY FROM PRIMATE ERRORS DURING TASK LEARNING. Retrieved June 26, 2024, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/9789812701886_0031
Abstract: The last two decades have seen a great deal of theorising and speculation about
the modular nature of human intelligence, as well as a rise in use of modular
architectures in artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, whether such models of natural
intelligence are well supported is still an issue of debate. In this paper, I propose
that the most important criteria for modularity is specialised representations. I
present a modular model of primate learning of the transitive inference task, and
propose an extension to this model which would explain task-learning results in
other domains. I also briefly relate this work to both neuroscience and established
AI learning architectures.
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Brannon, E. M., & Terrace, H. S. (1998). Ordering of the numerosities 1 to 9 by monkeys. Science, 282(5389), 746–749.
Abstract: A fundamental question in cognitive science is whether animals can represent numerosity (a property of a stimulus that is defined by the number of discriminable elements it contains) and use numerical representations computationally. Here, it was shown that rhesus monkeys represent the numerosity of visual stimuli and detect their ordinal disparity. Two monkeys were first trained to respond to exemplars of the numerosities 1 to 4 in an ascending numerical order (1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 4). As a control for non-numerical cues, exemplars were varied with respect to size, shape, and color. The monkeys were later tested, without reward, on their ability to order stimulus pairs composed of the novel numerosities 5 to 9. Both monkeys responded in an ascending order to the novel numerosities. These results show that rhesus monkeys represent the numerosities 1 to 9 on an ordinal scale.
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