Lecture 1.1 and 1.2
Introduction to Animal Cognition
Content of part 1
- Brief history of and intro to animal cognition
- Intro to some basic principles
- Give some examples of pehnomena we address
- Preparation for Q&A session
Victorian Biology
• Romanes
– He was darwin's nominated intellectual heir and he advocated for mental
continuity
– "Animal intelligence": collection of anecdotes which he interpreted
mentalistically
– He came up with idea of Scala naturae of mental function – this just means
that there is a smooth progression from lower animals to other higher
animals such as apes and ending at humans.
• Lloyd Morgan
– Biologist and Sceptical of Romanes
– Came up with Lloyd Morgan's Canon: “Invoke only those mental processes
necessary to explain the observed behavior.”
• Lloyd Morgan’s Canon is the really important thing here. We’ll be appealing to it at
various times throughout the module.
History II: Discovery of conditioning
• Thorndike
– He ran experimental studies of instrumental learning
– Claimed new complex behaviour arose through blind trial and error alone
– He proposed the laws of Exercise (behaviour is strengthened by repetition)
and Effect (behaviour is strengthened if "satisfying state of affairs" follows)
– Coined term "reinforcement"
– He described behaviour in terms of Stimulus-Response bonds
• Pavlov
– Observed "psychic secretions" of saliva in dogs
– Devised a theory of cortical excitation and inhibition to account for these
conditional reflexes
• Watson
– He reacted against introspectionist accounts of human mental life, thought
you couldn’t learn about psychology just be reflecting on one’s own thoughts
– Coined term "behaviourism"
– Assumes animals are like simple machines until proved otherwise
– He popularized Pavlovian "conditioning" as an explanation of all learning
, PSY2304: biological basis of behaviour
The meaning of Thorndike’s law of effect:
That a response of some kind followed by rewarding consequences will tend to increase that
chance of that response occurring again in that situation. And if the response is followed by
an aversive outcome, then the chance of that response being repeated declines. This is one
of the basic principles of instrumental learning.
We will now focus on how this works
Instrumental conditioning: based on the Law of effect
If in presence of a stimulus (noise), an animals response if followed by a reward, then it
strengthens the assiation between the stimulus and the reward (or the representations of
them in the animal’s mind). This means that the animal is more likely to repeat the response
when they are in the presence of the stimulus.
- This is a modern interpretation of Thorndike’s Law of Effect, but is the one in current
use. Notice that it requires the animal to do something (the response) for learning to
take place. Eventually, after enough trials of this type, when the stimulus occurs it
will automatically elicit the response – a habit.
Thorndike’s early experiments
In his early experiments, he used puzzle boxes and cats.
Procedure:
- The cats would have to perform a certain response (which varied between boxes) in
order to get out
- Cats were put into the box over multiple different trials
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