Time and Number S Time - long intervals

• if put in an environment with no day/night cues, animals generally

  still converge on a 24 hour cycle of sleep/ wakefulness

• zeitgeber "time giver"

• a stimulus that helps entrain the sleep/wakefulness cycle

• light

• temp

• social factors

• availability of food

• 20 hours seems to be the lower limit on these cycles and 30 hours is the

  upper limit
  Biebachs (1989) garden warblers
  • birds can learn location of food that is available at limited times • birds use circadian clock to judge time passage

Time-short intervals
• circadian clocks are only useful for judging larger intervals of time • what abut shorter time?
• long-tailed hermit hummingbird
• males want to minimize foraging time, to maximize time spent

impressing ladies - lekking Gill (1988)

• observed the humming birds fearing habits after a lek
• naturally occurring timing problem:
• nectar not full in flowers, have to wait to be filled again, wait too long

and flower could be drained by another humming bird
• artificial flowers placed around and humming birds timed when leave

and return
• flowers refilled after 20 mins, humming birds shoot for returning just

after 20 mins
• Gill changes time of refill, humming birds adapt
• rats understand time intervals too
• well demonstrated in operant conditioning
• fixed interval reward
Short interval time theories
• interval clock theories of understanding short intervals of time • Church, 1978
• scalar timing
• internal "ticks" counted in STM store
• number of ticks in STM is compared with number in LTM from

previous experience with the task
Number concepts
• are humans born with numerical concepts?
• does a baby understand the difference between 3 and 5? • or do we only have these ideas as a product of education?

Number concepts in nun-human species
• lions
• need to be able to estimate how many licks are in a rival pride • consequences of a miscalculation can be quite dire! McComb, Packer and Pusey 1994

• play sounds of roaring intruder lion (1) or lions (3) for prides of

  different sizes and observe responses

• approach, stay, retreat

• latency of approach
  Number concepts in chimpanzees
  • Wilson, Hauser, Wrangham (2001)
  • chimpanzees
  • fission-fusion communities
  • pant-hoot
  • multi-purpose call
  • call group members when food is abundant
  • locate group members in the brush
  • warn off rival groups
  • chorusing
  • play pant-hoot of foreign male and observe reactions
  • played when chimps were stationary
  • probability of the group counteracting or approaching the call is

  dependent on number of adult males in group

Number concepts
• what does it mean to have a sense of number?
• several ideas embedded in numerical concepts
• relative number judgement: which pile has more candy?
• absolute number judgement: a pile with 5 A's has something in

common with a pile with 5 b's
• counting
• applying a label for numerical groups
• arithmetical operations
Relative judgement
• Koehler’s classic experiments with birds
• pigeons can learn to choose smaller or larger number of grains in this

task
• they learn the task easier if the values are farther apart rather than

consecutive values
Emmerton did a series of studies following up on Koehler's seminal work • pigeons in skinner boxes
• originally trained to discriminate:
• many: 6 dots, 7 dots
• reward for pecking key 1
• few: 1 dot, 2 dot
• reward for pecking key 2
• later tested on 3 and 5 dots
• perform correctly!
• results do suggest that pigeons do have a concept of relative judgement Absolute judgement
• Davis and Albert 1986
• Rocky the raccoon
• Rocky is given clear plastic cubes with varying numbers of items

inside

• Only the boxes with 3 items can open
• 326 sessions of this were completed with Rocky
• Can he learn about the concept of 3?
Davis and Bradford 1986
• train rats to take food from the third of six tunnels • all tunnels have food
• but all but third doors are locked
• tunnels moved around trial to trial
• with training rats could do it.
Platt and Johnson 1971

• train rats to make specific numbers of lever presses in order to earn

  reward

• if rat puts head in reward chamber before or after correct count, count

  starts over

• rats do well on this task

• accuracy high for small numbers (below 10)

• some evidence they can learn numbers up to 50! Counting

• in order to count you need a concept of relative number and a concert

  of absolute umber

• in addition, you reed to recognize two more numerical ideas:

• Tagging: a number was a specific tag that goes with it "one'

• Cardinality: the tag for the last item in the set is the name for the

  number of items in the set Counting crows
  • Liau et al 2024
  • carrion crows
  • numerical competency
  • volitional vocal control (mimic)

• The crows flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalization in response to arbitrary cues associated with numbers (?)

Alex and counting
• language is helpful when assessing counting skill
• Alex!
• model/rival technique
• humans demonstrate the response
• humans is model
• get question right, get attention - Alex gets jealous if not getting

attention
Number concepts
Hunt et al 2008
• number concepts in New Zealand robins
• food caching birds
• often eat insects that are too large to eat at once
• hide pieces around habitat for winter
• might need to keep track of how many food items are stored in a given

location Arithmetic

• Rugani et al 2009
• chicks
• presented with 5 kinder eggs in incubator
• imprinting
• on day 3 of life, chicks moved to experimental chamber with 1 egg • egg moved behind a screen with chick watching
• chick allowed to follow egg behind screen
Testing
• SDT - simultaneous disappearance
• CDT - consecutive disappearance

s

The concept of O
• a trickier concept for humans
• historically emerges within last 4,000 years
• doesn't emerge developmentally until after other numbers
Howard et al 2018
• Bees
• fewer than 1 million neurons
• diverged from mammals 600 million years ago
• do they have a concept of O?
• results say likely or that they can tell nothing is less than something

Cause and Effect
Associative learning
• learning about the relationship between two separate stimuli • conditioning
• classical
• operant
Ivan Pavlov
• Nobel prize in medicine for his work on digestion
• " psychic secretions"
• a new research direction
• famous experiments with dogs
Core components of classical conditioning
• unconditioned stimulus (US)
• unconditioned response (UR)
• conditioned stimuli (CS)
• conditioned response (Cr)
Olson and Fazio
• told to look for target amongst "random images and words" • target: snorlax

• In actuality images are not totally random
• later asked participants to rate now much they like different Pokémon In what species do we see classical conditioning?
• sea slug, rats, frogs, fish, bees, snakes
Exam recap and paper ideas
Exam: I maybe got a high B?
Paper ideas: research paper (argument paper) or experimentation proposal • Dog using scent as a timer experiment
• Switching out species in an experiment
• google news for more ideas
• go to office hours
• search on google scholar or psychinfo

Paper ideas
• bunny the dog and her "talking" ability with buttons
• is she actually communicating and understanding the words

associated with the buttons?

Cause and effect
• classical conditioning
• Eric Kandel
• Aplysia
• sea snail
• 20,000 neurons
• only 2 neurons controlling tongue and mouth

• Gill withdrawal reflex-animal mouse to protect gill with mantle if siphon is contacted

• can classically condition this behavior...
  Classical conditioning in male blue gouramis
  • male gouramis need to protect a territory to attract a mate
  • defend their territories very aggressively and sometimes attack potential

  mates
  Hollis et al 1997
  • condition male gouramis
  • 10 S exposure to white light
  • followed by 5 minutes of exposure to female fish
  • light signals female fish is coming
  • as a result, more mating displays, less biting
  • conditioned male fish have far more offspring
  Domjan
  • CS can signal important biological events
  • Michael Domjan
  • red light (NS) and sexually approachable female quail • red light becomes CS
  • males mate more quickly and release more sperm
  • capacity for conditioning gives reproductive edge
  • role in fetish formation
  Evolution and classical conditioning

• Pavlovian conditioning is an evolved mechanism that enables animals

  to be sensitive to signals that are important to their lives

• Drongos and meercats
  What is really learned in classical conditioning?
  • are the animals learning about cause and effect?

  • Pavlov believed animals were leaning abut contiguity • closeness in time and space

• How does contiguity influence CC, in your experience?
• how close in time does a stimuli's need to be for CC to be observed? • depends
• taste aversion - 1 day
• eye blink conditioning - 1 second
Rescorla’s contiguity experiment
• random control procedure
• contingency - one stimulus...
Kamin'S contingency experiment
• contiguity and contingency needed to CC to be observed Classical conditioning in slime molds?
• unicellular organism - sort of
• no nervous system
• may have seen them in the woods on a rotting log
Boisseau, Vogel, and dussutour 2016
• slime molds
• can a unicellular organism with no neurons learn?
• 3 bridge conditions:
• quinine
• caffeine
• control
• habituation?
• learns to ignore a stimulus when the stimulus is repeated and

spontaneously recovers when withheld for 2 day's
Instrumental / operant conditioning
Thorndike's cat experiment
• law of effect
• responses that produce good effects will be repeated
• responses that yield negative effects less likely to be repeated
• environmental stimulus added = positive reinforcement increases a

behavior = positive punishment decreases behavior
• environmental stimulus removed = negative reinforcement increases

behavior = negative punishment decreases behavior
B.F. Skinner
• must prominent psychologist of his time
• used operant conditioning to help explain school learning, superstitious

behavior and more
• project pigeon
• train pigeons to guide bombs towards a target
• project discontinued after US uses nuclear bombs B. F. Skinner explaining superstition

• according to skinner, a superstitious behavior is a behavior that is

  accidentally reinforced

• skinner places hungry pigeons in a skinner box and food is dispensed

  randomly

• one pigeon learned to turn left

• one pigeon thrusts head into upper corner of box

• pigeons begin exhibiting "superstitious" behavior
  Staddon and simmelhag 1971
  • replicate skinner
  • pigeon behavior is not random, pigeons all do mostly the same behavior • peck at the food magazine
  • an action that is approiate for trying to get food

What is learned in operant conditioning?
• contiguity
• timing is very important in operant conditioning
• an internal of 2 seconds between action and consequence can be too

long for learning to occur
Contingency
• reliable dependency of one event upon another
• when rewards are not delivered consistently, learning slows
• can learn more complex relationships between stimuli too
• e.g. A reward is only available under specific conditions
Operant conditioning outside the lab
Dorey, Rosales - Ruiz, smith and Lovelace 2009
Rafiki
• olive baboon
• engaging in self injurious behavior
• hair pulling
• biting
• why? Rafiki wanted interaction with zoo keepers
• treatment: reinforce alternative behavior, "you look pretty today" ignore

SIB
• SIB drops off and lip smacking behavior goes up Innate limits on classical and operant conditioning

• when conditioning was introduced, it was though that any stimulus

  could easily be paired with any response

• all learning is equally probable under the light
  Limits of classical conditioning
  • conditioned taste aversion
  • Garcia notices rats don't drink water in cages rats have previously been

  sick in
  • rats learn association between tastes and illness really fast -often in

one trial

• are natural limits on the kinds of associations we can form with classical conditioning?

Garcia and koelling 1965
• rats exposed to "bright noisy" water or sweetened water
• subsequently, some rats exposed to shock, some to brief X-ray
• there are limitations on the associations we can create! Evolutionary

history may shape learning potential
Innate knowledge
• Lorenz and Tinbergen 1948
• Turkey chicks
• hawk/goose
• move to the right = hawk
• more to the left = goose
• chicks more fearful of the hawk model than the goose model • innate fearfulness of stimuli over others
• heart monitor studies
• controversial finding

Innate knowledge
Cook and mineka 1990

• Expose monkeys to videos of other monkeys reacting fearfully to a

  stimulus

• stimulus is either a: toy snake, toy flower, toy croc, toy rabbit

• the monkeys learn to fear the snake and the croc, but not the rabbit or the

  flower
  The misbehavior of organisms
  • Keller and Marion Breland
  • when project pigeon is defended, these former students of skinner go into

  business applying skinners ideas
  • animal behavior of enterprises
  • train pigs to put coins in banks for TV commercials, etc.
  • instinctive drift: pig thinks coin = food, so pig treats coin like food
  • animals are not "tabula rasa" or blank slates
  Reasoning
  • adapt thought or action to some end
  • is it something more than "simple" associative learning?
  • (classical or operant )
  • usually refers to more complex behavior
  • flexibility response
  • integration of info and drawing conclusions based in info that is not

  immediately available to the senses
  • vs. Fixed action patterns or association
  Fixed action patterns
  • reliably elicited by releasing stimuli
  • complex behaviors-more than a reflex
  • rigid, predictable, and highly structured sequences • once triggered, will continue to completion
  • independent of experience

Descartes
• Reason
• humans are the only ones capable of having reason
Tool use
• tool use once considered a uniquely human capability
• tool: external object used for some desired end
• Oakley, 1949 " man the toolmaker "
Tool use in other species
• what should count as tool use?
• antlion larvae
• excavate funnel shaped pits to trap prey
• if prey tries to escape the antlion throws sand at it
• is this tool use?
• is it reasoning?
• not flexible to differing circumstances, not integrating info
• not reasoning, more like FAP
Flexibility in tool use
• some definitions of tool use by animals require "flexibility"
• animal must transport, modify or select the tool in a way that

illustrates awareness of relationship between the object and the task Sea otters

• hall and schaller, 1964
• observe that sea otters hold onto same rock to open mussels
• implies some foresight (?) - planning to use rock again for next musse
Flexibility in tool use
• Taylor, hunt and gray 2012
• New Caledonian crow
• food near potentially dangerous stimuli

• Crows have access to stick, but food is within easy reach • a toy snake is then put behind the food
• when do they choose the stick?
• they use the stick more when the toy snake is present

• this shows that crows know when it is appropriate to use a tool after weighing the potential danger of the situation

Tool use for defense/ hunting

• coconut octopus use shells or parts of coconuts and camouflage to help

  concede themselves from predators and to catch prey

• Brooks 1988

• hermit crabs placed in tank with on octopus

• prior to release of octopus, crabs are allowed to place 0, 1 or 3 anemones

  on their shells

• crabs that attach anemones survive longer - tool use helps them survive The role of insight in problem solving
  • Rutz et al 2016
  • describe multiple instances of crow tool bending being observed in the

  wild
  • argue this is not insight
  • a species specific behavior Insight
  • Wolfgang kohler (1925)
  • waiting on blockade
  • chimpanzees
  • block stacking problem
  • two stick problem
  Insight failures
  • visalbergi and limongelli 1994 • tufted capuchins
  • trap tube test

• Rb did well with this task, but he didn't learn the task, he instead learned to put the stick in the side of the tube furthest from the treat

• chimpanzees in a similar test show more success
Hood 1999
• cotton top tamarins
• expose the Cotten top tamarins to a box with different tubes connected to

different holes
• The CTT's fail to learn that the object doesn't fall straight down Transitive inference
• deducing new relationships from stated relationships
• can other animals do this?
• pigeons can #
• wasps and honeybees
• similar nervous systems
• worker honeybees do not have extensive social striation
• wasps live in complex socially structured hierarchies
Tibbett'S et al 2019
• honey bees cannot learn this task
• but wasps can
• colors associated with shock/safety
• why can wasps do this but not bees?
• because wasps already live in a hierarchal society and understand a

pecking order
• tracking social hierarchies is a form of transitive inference problem • generally species they have hierarchies well on this task

The social complexity hypothesis

• asserts that animals living in large social groups should display

  enhanced cognitive abilities along predictable dimensions.

• bond, kamil and balda 2003

• corvids: pinyon jays and scrub jays
  Pinyon jays
  • more social corvids
  • live in colonies of 50 -500 individuals
  • forage together as a permanent flock
  Western scrub jay
  • social unit much smaller
  • typically a breeding pair and their offspring for the year Fairness

• two capuchin monkeys side by side, given a task and cucumber as a

  reward

• when one monkey is given cucumber and the other is given a grape, the

  first monkey rejects cucumber unless also given to the other monkey

• is the monkey protesting unfairness or just wanting a grape? Fairness in canines
  • range et al 2008

  • 2 dogs asked for paw command
  • social conditions and asocial conditions
  • equity, quality inequity, reward inequity, effort control Fairness and the inequity aversion hypothesis

• a number of theories about why species react to unfairness have been put

  forward

• inequity aversion - contends that subjects track and compare their

reward scheme with that of the partner

• Frustration hypothesis - a subjects past experience in receiving a preferred reward for a task creates an expectation to receive this reward

• Food expectation hypothesis - sight of the HV food creates expectation Creativity in animals
  • thinking and acting in novel or flexible ways can be a part of reasoning • kuczak and eskilinen 2014
  • Dolphins positively reinforced for producing a novel behavior
  • Dolphins with extensive training history
  • each has a repertoire of behaviors that trainers have rewarded
  • wave pectoral fin
  • sink
  Long term planning in animals
  • corvids
  • train ravens to operate a machine by dropping a rock inside
  • offer ravens rock or food when machine is not available
  • 15 min later, machine becomes available
  • Raven performance parallels that of great apes

  Social cognition

• cognitive processes devoted to learning about and interacting with other

  individuals

• usually conspecifics - a member of your own species

• the most interesting social cognition usually emerges in species that

  form stable hierarchical groups

• thinking about the relation between the self and others within the group Animal selves
  • mirror recognition
  • self awareness can be a tricky thing to document
  • developed by Gordon Gallup Jr.

Mirror recognition
• scoring the mirror task
• social responses - hi and thinking its someone
• physical inspection - looking behind minor
• repetitive mirror-testing behavior
• contingency resting - funny movements
• realization of seeing themselves
• self directed behavior - check hair or teeth, preening
Animal selves
• why is it important to have a self concept?
• once I know myself I can build my narrative
• Gallup 1970
• wild born chimps, living in captivity
• given access to mirror for 10 days
• anesthetize chimps, paint brow and ear
• mark test: wake chimps, expose to mirror, gauge reaction
• results show that chimps could recognize themselves in a mirror Mirror recognition

• chimps are not as similar to us as sometimes made out to be in mark

  test

• Povinelli 1993

• touch marks 2.5 times in a half hour without mirror, 3.9 times in 30

  minutes with a mirror

• different chimps react differently

• chimps, orangutans, gorillas all pass the mark test

• old and new world monkeys and gibbons all fail

• w&u argue that these findings may se popular because they reinforce old

  stereotypes about the superiority of great apes

Epstein, Lanza, skinner 1981
• 2 pre test phases
• 1. use mirror to respond to bee light behind them -reward for pecks
• 2. Blue sticker put on part of pigeon it can see - reward for pecks
• 3. Blue dot where pigeon can't see unless using mirror
kohda et al 2019
• Cleaner wrasse
• shown mirror, show contingency testing and self directed behavior • given infections, some leave mark others don't
• show face scraping in mark condition
De waal
• framework on the evolution of self concept
• doesn't have to be an all or none dichotomy
• may develop "like on onion"
Animal selves
• video recognition
• chimps are successful in this task
Differentiating self from other

• many species are born with references for visual stimuli that resemble

  conspecifics

• point light display

• newborn animals prefer lights that move in a way consistent with

  biological movement of species

• humans, chicken chicks

Rosa-salva et al 2019
• do chicks prefer visual features of adult hens? • normal hen vs. Chicken cube

• chicks chose target configuration of normal animal
Sensitivity to the actions of others
• we need to be able to react appropriately to behaviors of others
• sometimes, conspecific may share important into about location of food

or threats
• signal - intentional behavior intended to communicate with others • cue- inadvertently tipping off other to some info
Domestic dogs
• uniquely good at interpreting signals and cues from humans
• object choice task
• dogs follow human points with great accuracy, able to follow more

subtle signals at times
• chimps and wolves do poorly on this task
• this leads some to argue that dogs are born with a genetic

predisposition to follow orders ; they were bred basically
Lazarowski and Dorman 2015
• does the amount of experience with humans matter?
• "wild dogs" vs. Pet dogs
• pet dogs do better combination of genetics
Theory of mind
• an animal with Tom:
• believes that mental states play a causal role in generating behavior • infers that presence of mental states in others by observing their

appearance and behavior

Shafroth, Basile, Martin and Murray, 2021

• do rhesus monkeys experience a feeling of narrative agency in the

  heider-simmel video? No.

• 3 categories: theory of mind, goal directed, random

• eye track the monkeys to watch their focus on the videos

• monkeys looked more at the goal directed videos
  Social cognition: deceit
  • magnificent spider
  • Bolus
  • pheromone smells like female moth. Deception?
  Brown, Garwood and Williamson, 2012
  • mourning cuttle fish
  • mantle coloration can be changed
  • male and female pattern
  • cuttlefish males only engage in deceptive behavior when other males

  won't be around to punish the behavior
  Cheney and Seyfarth
  • vervet monkeys
  • alarm calls for different predators
  • low ranking male (kitui) sounding "leopard" alarm call to scare off

  new males. deception?
  • operant explanation: negative reinforcement
  Shaw and Clayton 2012
  • Eurasian jays
  • 3 conditions: alone, competitor can see and hear, competitor can hear

  not see
  • given opportunity to cache in pots with different substrates in the

aviary

• Caching in sand is quieter than in gravel
• the jays consider visual and auditory info when caching. Shaw

argues these results may suggest that jays can represent sensory

experiences of other birds.
Social cognition: deceit
Woodruff and premack 1979
• chimpanzees learn to interact with cooperative and competitive trainer • point to box with food:

• competitor takes food
• cooperator gives food
• chimps learn but it takes them many trials of training
• discriminative stimulus? You can teach animals contingency's: each

trainer is associated with treat or no treat • evidence of theory of mind?
Povinelli'S study
• chimp placed in front of 4 containers

• assistant places food in one container and leaves
• new assistant comes in and guesses with point to a container
• knower in the room when food was placed also points to a container • only 2 chimps learn to perform well, takes at least 100 trials
Food competition paradigm: Hare et al 2000
• can chimps imagine other chimps POV?
• results show subordinates consistently venture out to get food they

believe dominant can't see