CONF: Animal Cognition Workshop - 18/19 June (fwd)

2008年05月25日 22:04

Programme

18 June

10:00 - 12:00   Professor Colin Allen
(Indiana University, Bloomington)
Lecture: How hard is the science of animal minds?

12:00 - 13:00   Lunch (own arrangements)

13:00 - 14:00   Dr Suzanne Held
(Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, Bristol)
Studies in pig social cognition: methods and interpretations

14:00 - 14:10   Short Break

14:10 - 14:40   Joanne Edgar
(Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, Bristol)
Empathic abilities in animals

14:40 - 15:10   Bryony Pierce
(Department of Philosophy, Bristol)
How could behavioural observations be used to support attributions of
consciousness?

19 June

10:00 - 12:00   Professor Colin Allen
Seminar: Dynamical perspectives on animal cognition

Venues
18 June:        Arts Lecture Theatre 2, 11 Woodland Road. Proceed via the main
entrance to the rear of the house. Lecture Theatre 2 is situated to the
back left of the student common room.

19 June:        Common Room of the Philosophy Department, 9 Woodland Road (ground
floor).

ABSTRACTS

Colin Allen

Lecture: How hard is the science of animal minds?

There has been a remarkable explosion of work on animal cognition in the
past 10 to 15 years. Culture, tool use, and episodic memory, to name just a
few areas, have been studied more extensively, and in a broader range of
species, than ever before. At the same time, the  scientific study of
animal minds remains mired in methodological  controversy and problems of
interpretation that lead some  commentators to dismiss it as “soft
science.”  I will argue that some of these criticisms are justified, but
that they are the result of a fractionated approach to animal behaviour
that encourages “trophy hunting” instead of an integrated approach to
cognitive modelling that integrates evolution, learning, development, and
mechanisms.  Putting these pieces together will not be easy, but the
resulting “hard science” should be well worth the effort.

Seminar: Dynamical perspectives on animal cognition

Despite the uptake of dynamical modelling approaches into human cognitive
psychology, evolutionary robotics, and artificial life, the movement has,
with a few exceptions, had very little influence on research into animal
cognition.  Such applications as there are seem  polarized between concern
with “low level” behaviours, such as  navigation by ants, and “higher
level” behaviours, which are sometimes captured by metaphors such as
“communication as dance”.  It is a common criticism of dynamical systems
models that they don’t “scale up” to “interesting” cognitive capacities.
Does the dearth of dynamical models for animal cognition signal that this
critique is right, or is it worth trying to build dynamical models of
“mid-level” cognition?

Suzanne Held
Studies in pig social cognition: methods and interpretations

The talk will focus on behavioural experiments, which investigated the
foraging tactics of domestic pigs for insight into their cognitive skills.
In one experiment, for example, a dominant and a subordinate pig foraged
together for a monopolizable food bait, but only the subordinate knew where
this was hidden. Dominants learnt to abandon searching for themselves and
to follow the subordinates instead, thereby dramatically increasing their
success. Subordinates responded idiosyncratically, with tactics variously
sensitive to the relative location, direction of movement and visual
perspective of the dominant. Tactics appeared designed to outwit the
dominant, but in fact were ineffective, and thus unlikely to be a result of
positive reinforcement during the experiment. In another study we tested
whether one pig can take the visual perspective of another. For reasons
unrelated to cognitive skill, most pigs did not reach the critical test:
the one individual that did also clearly discriminated between informants
on the basis of their visual perspectives. I shall discuss our methods and
results with respect to claims of mental state attribution and
intentionality in pigs and other species.

Joanne Edgar
Empathic abilities in animals

The extent to which animals are affected by the distress of conspecifics is
of high relevance to the welfare of group-housed farmed and laboratory
animals.  These animals may be exposed to situations in which they
experience visual, olfactory and auditory cues from distressed
conspecifics, for example during frequent routine procedures or during
transport and slaughter.  Work in this area is minimal, but there is some
evidence to suggest that animals are motivated to limit the perceived
distress of conspecifics and are affected physiologically by that distress.
Debate in the literature as to whether animals are capable of empathy is
largely dependent upon the definition of empathy used.  Whether animals
experience cognitive understanding of the distress of conspecifics remains
an important goal in empathy research.

Bryony Pierce
How could behavioural observations be used to support attributions of
consciousness?

Allen and Bekoff, in Species of Mind, say that there are ‘plenty of
philosophical theories of qualia on offer [?] but none of them provides
clear methodological suggestions for ethologists’ (1997, 144).  The
methodology they propose is to perform observations of animal behaviour in
search of characteristics associated with consciousness.  They believe a
definition of consciousness should be the endpoint rather than the starting
point of scientific investigation.  If behavioural observations are to be
used to support attributions of consciousness, some hypothesis about the
role of consciousness in producing behaviour is necessary to establish
which characteristics are relevant.  In the absence of a definition of
consciousness, data may demonstrate correlations between the behaviour of
conscious humans and that of animals, but will be inconclusive with regard
to the question Allen and Bekoff are interested in - that of whether
animals are conscious.  This paper will propose a suitable working
hypothesis.