week 14

Anthropomorphism

Projecting human qualities onto animals.

Animal Thoughts

Studying the size of various structures in the animal brain gives us a window into how that animal thinks about the world.

Pain in Mammals

Mammals feel pain because they all have nociceptors and a thalamus.

Brain Wrinkles and Intelligence

The more wrinkled the brain, the higher the surface area of the cortex and thus the greater neuronal density.

Mammalian Emotions

All mammals are thought to experience the most basic of emotions, but no more than a 2-year-old human.

Human Crying

Humans are the only animals that cry as a sign of emotion or distress.

Animal Cognition Evolution

Animals evolved to respond to certain unique challenges they faced in their unique evolutionary histories.

Occlusion task

Using eye-tracking technology to determine whether the person anticipates the rolling ball to emerge.

Animal Mental Tools

All animals possess different mental tools for efficiently interacting with their environment

Inductive Reasoning

Involves observing specific trends or patterns, and then generalizing.

Pavlov's Dogs and Inductive Reasoning

The dogs observed specific instances of a bell being rung when food was served and generalized that bells signal food.

Deductive Reasoning

Honeybees went to the orange 'flowers,' indicating they were able to utilize deductive reasoning.

Law of Syllogism

A form of deductive reasoning utilized by honeybees. All bees go to flowers for food; therefore, I will personally choose the orange flower for food.

Chinese Room Thought Experiment

A thought experiment that demonstrates that a system can produce correct responses without understanding.

Clever Hans

A horse who could seemingly perform arithmetic but was actually reading body language.

Clever Hans Effect

Animals relying on human posture, voice intonation, etc., when responding to a human’s question.

Confirmation Bias

Skeptics suggest that Bunny the dog's communication is a combination of the Clever Hans Effect and this.

Animal Intelligence

Thinking of an animal’s abilities with respect to our own often prevents us from truly understanding how they DIFFER, and thus the unique abilities they possess.