Sunday, May 19, 2013

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

Holding a Mirror Up to Science and Nature

 
Throwing Water on His Enthusiasm
When “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” was made on July 12th last year, I refrained from making any critical comments in deference to Marc Bekoff, my (then) colleague at PsychologyToday.com. I didn’t want to throw any water on his enthusiasm by writing a more realistic assessment (such as the one found here).

What is the declaration? You can read the entire document here: (it’s only 2 pages long). Or read the actual declaration below:

“The absence of a neo-cortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states, along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

The first thing to realize is that the declaration contains no definition of what consciousness or self-awareness are, no definition of intent or examples of “intentional” behaviors in non-human animals, nor any other higher mental capacity that humans and animals might hypothetically share except for “affect,” which is the ability feel pleasure, pain, simple emotions and feeling states.

The scientists who produced this document set out 4 specific rationales for the declaration, contained in 4 short paragraphs.

Poking a Stick in a Bottle
Paragraph 1 states that research into consciousness is “rapidly evolving,” and that this calls for “a periodic re-evaluation of previously- held preconceptions in this field.” It’s true that there are some long-held preconceptions, and that they should be re-evaluated. However that doesn’t mean that humans are not unique in the animal world.

For instance, in recent years much ado has been made of the fact that chimpanzees, other apes, and even corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, etc.) have been observed using, and in some cases even fabricating, tools that enable them to access food. It’s quite amazing to see a crow bend a wire with its beak and use it to get food out of a long-necked bottle. But some scientists have tested corvids and apes to determine whether they understand “why” their tools are effective, and the answer seems to be no: these animals have no idea as to how or why they work.1

Yes, these behaviors are amazing. But they don’t rise to anything near the human ability to design manufacturing plants devoted to building automobiles, airplanes, or spacecraft, or designing robots that can help doctors perform surgery, or creating computers and smart phones, or big-budget movies filled with tons of CGI effects, etc, etc, etc.

Paragraph 2 is about neural substrates of “affect” or emotion, which don’t appear to be confined to the neo-cortex—a part of the brain that is highly developed in humans. This is not news. Emotion is controlled by an older part of the brain called the limbic system, not the more recently evolved neo-cortex. The only passing reference to “consciousness” here is the mention of “states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making,” which the authors say are “evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks.” 2

Paragraph 3 is about an apparent parallel evolution of bird and human consciousness (again without a clear definition of what that is). This idea is supposedly backed up by “near human-like levels of consciousness … observed in African grey parrots.” Further evidence of the similarities between bird and human consciousness is cited in a single study done on 4 magpies, 2 of which exhibited “self-recognition” during a mirror test.3

The declaration mentions mirror tests done on dolphins and elephants. Using the plural here is a bit of sophistry: only one dolphin and one elephant have passed the test. The declaration makes it seem as if all dolphins and elephants have self-awareness. (Since von Economo neurons—which seem necessary for an organism to acquire self-awareness—have been found in the brains of both species, this is entirely possible, though dolphins have far more VENs than we do, and elephants have far less.)

Paragraph 4 talks about how hallucinogens may disrupt cortical processing, and that certain psychotropic drugs that disrupt normal conscious behaviors in humans seem to produce similar behavioral disruptions in non-human animals as well. Since there’s no clear evidence that the disruptions were rooted specifically, and solely in consciously-derived behavioral choices, this too is meaningless.

What really jumped out at me, though, was the mirror test on magpies. When I read that I had to scratch my head. Since the mirror test is one way of determining if a non-human animal has the capacity for self-awareness, it seemed to me that there must have been some mistake here, either in how the test was administered, or in the whole idea that the mirror test is some kind of proof of self-awareness.

So I did some research. And here’s what I found out.

Monkey See, Monkey Do
The mirror test comes was reportedly inspired by something Charles Darwin saw while on a visit to the London Zoo in 1838. He observed an orangutan named Jenny throwing a tantrum after being teased with an apple by her keeper. This made Darwin wonder what the subjective experience of an orangutan might be like. He also watched Jenny gaze into a mirror and wondered if she recognized her own reflection.

In 1970, Gordon Gallup Jr. did the first mirror test on non-human animals with two male and two female wild preadolescent chimpanzees. They were exposed to a mirror for 10 days, familiarizing them with its reflecting properties. Then they were sedated and marked with an odorless dye on the upper part of one eyebrow and the opposite ear.

Then they were put in a cage and observed for 30 minutes to determine if they touched either of the marked areas. Finally the mirror was reintroduced into the cage and the chimpanzees were observed for mark-directed behaviour. The number of incidences of mark-directed behavior rose from one during the post-anaesthesia, mirror-less period to four to ten after the mirror was reintroduced (Gallup, 1970).

According to Gallup’s interpretation, passing the mirror test shows that an animal is capable of conceptual self-awareness, one of the cognitive features that, according to "The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness," some animals share with us (Gallup, 1977, p. 337).

Is It All Just Smoke and Mirrors?
However, the mirror test does not show a de facto cognitive ability. For instance, Western children show mirror recognition at about 18 – 24 months of age. But some children don’t just try to wipe a “hidden” mark off their own nose, they’ll also try to wipe a non-existent mark when they see it on their mother’s nose. 4 Also, some children from other cultures are reportedly unable to pass the mirror test until about theyre about 7 years of age. 5

Another problem is that Gallup said that about the test with chimpanzees that it was the ability or opportunity to view themselves  as others saw them that made them capable of passing the mirror test. Yet autistic children, some of whom don’t have the ability to see themselves from another’s perspective have no trouble passing the mirror test. 6

Another unanswered question is how people suffering psopagnosia—the inability to recognize faces—clearly have the capacity for self awareness but are unable to pass the mirror test.

Complicating things further is the fact that human children go through a number of stages of awareness, and changes in mood, when introduced to their images in a mirror.

The Complexities of the Mirror Phase in Children
In her 1968 doctoral dissertation (predating Gallup’s work by 2 years), Beulah Amsterdam not only tested young children for mirror recognition using the hidden-mark, she also first noticed that children went through 4 discrete stages of mirror interactions: 7, 8, 9 

1st) from about 3 – 12 months babies tend to view their own mirror image as a playmate, 2nd) from around the first year, they seem to treat the mirror with curiosity or as a possible window (they often try to look behind it to see what’s theree), 3rd) at about 13 months, children become troubled by their mirror image; they cry when they see their image, or avoid looking into the mirror at all, and 4th) starting at 14 – 20 months children show embarrassment, coy glances at the mirror, and exhibit silly, clowning behaviors.

Russian documentary film maker Viktor Kossakovsky filmed his 2-year old son Syto. Syto had been raised in a house with no mirrors. When he was shown a mirror for the first time he went through the 4 stages described by Dr. Amsterdam, all within a period of 45 minutes, caught on film in one continuous shot. 10

“The drama that makes Kossakovsky’s movie particularly memorable, is the child’s portrayed struggle in coming to term with the fact that the mirror is not a transparent window or open door revealing a new playmate. This slow realization is clearly for Svyto a source of intense wariness toward his own specular image as an alienated object, including long bouts of agitation, rage, and the expression of poignant despair, that is eventually transformed into an intense display of narcissism and self-consciousness.” 11

These are very complex and complicated behaviors, not seen in mirror tests done on chimps or other non-human animals. In fact, a chimp’s first response to seeing its reflection in a mirror is no different from species-specific behaviors of a dog or cat when confronted with their own image: play bows, threatening postures, vocalizations, etc. 12

Daniel Povinelli of LSU’s Cognitive Science Lab has suggested that the behaviors Gallup observed in chimpanzees may be purely sensory in nature, and may not “reflect” higher cognitive functioning. 13 Many of the chimps’ exploratory behaviors involved bringing various body parts into contact with the mirrors’ surface, the way an infant will touch the glass. What they were exhibiting, though, may have been a simple perceptual understanding of the one-to-one relationship with the mirror image and the animals physical body, not one that’s necessarily conceptual. And they certainly don’t exhibit the kind of complex behaviors and emotions seen in Amsterdam’s studies on infants or in Kosakovsky’s documentary.

It seems to me that all of this movement by science toward blurring the distinctions between human and animal cognition derive from two things: ignoring Morgan’s canon,  and over-exaggerating the importance of something Charles Darwin wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” 

Yet a few sentences later Darwin opened the door to the possibility that he could be wrong about that statement: “If it be maintained that certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc. are peculiar to man, it may well be that these are … results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again are mainly the result of the continued use of a highly-developed language.” 14

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1) Daniel J. Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee’s Theory of How the World Works, Oxford University Press, 2000, 400 pp


3) Prior H, Schwarz A, (2008) “Mirror-induced behavior in the magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of self-recognition.” PLoS Biol

4.) Mitchell, R.W., 1993. “Mental models of mirror self-recognition: Two theories.” New Ideas in Psychology, 11(3), 295-325) 1993.

4) Medina, et al, “New Caledonian crows’ responses to mirrors,” Animal Behavior, July 22, 2011.)

5) Broesch, T., Callaghan, T., Henrich, J., Murphy, C., & Rochat, P. “Cultural variations in children’s mirror self-recognition.” Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology.

6) Rochat & Zahavi, “The Uncanny Mirror: A re-framing of mirror self-experience,” Animal Cognition, 20 (2011) 204-213.

7) Amsterdam, B. K. (1968). Mirror behavior in children under two years of age doctoral dissertation, Univ. North Carolina. Order No. 6901569; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106.

8) Amsterdam, B. (1972). Mirror self-image reactions before age two. Developmental Psychobiology, 5, 297–305.

9) Amsterdam, B. K., & Levitt, M. (1980). Consciousness of self and painful self-consciousness. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 35, 67–83.

10) Kosakovsky, V. (2005). Svyto: documentary film.

11) The Uncanny Mirror: A re-framing of mirror self-experience,” Philippe Rochat, Dan Zahavi, Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011) 204-213.

12) Zazzo, R. (1982). The person: Objective approaches. In W. W. Hartup (Ed.). Review of child development research (Vol. 6, pp. 247–290). Chicago University Press.

13) Povinelli, D. J., Rulf, A. R., Landau, K., & Bierschwale, D. T. (1993). Self-recognition in chimpanzees (pan troglodytes): Distribution, ontogeny, and patterns of emergence. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 107, 347–372.

14) Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter 3, pgs. 100-101.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Dogs Have a Theory of Mind, But Whose Mind Is It?

If Dogs Can't Think, How Do They Know What We're Thinking? 
Originally published in slightly different form on July 30, 2010 at PsychologyToday.com 

 
Fancy Holds a Stay

Dognitive scientist Brian Hare's new book is getting some press these days. There was a recent piece in the New York Times on his work showing that dogs will follow where a human points while chimps not only won't, but can't seem to learn how to.

Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College was quoted in the Times article: “To me, part of being a dog scientist is acknowledging up front how little we know about their cognition. Science has just begun to investigate the dog mind, and our current understanding is minimal. It would be honest to admit how mysterious this other mind really is.”

I don't think it's all that mysterious. I just think it's very different from our usual way of thinking. 

The following is a piece I originally wrote for PsychologyToday.com.

Dogs are amazing animals. They have an ability to read us like no other species can. Sometimes they know more about us than we know about ourselves. They also score higher on certain so-called "mind-reading" tests than chimpanzees, where the goal is to see which animal can more reliably follow a visual cue given when a human being points at or even looks toward a prey object.

Dogs can learn to do this quite easily, chimps can't.

To some people this clearly indicates that dogs have a first level Theory of Mind. What does that mean? 

If you and I were sitting across from each other and I pointed at something behind you, you would either look to see what was back there or ask, "What is it?" That's because we both know you don't have "eyes in the back of your head." The conclusion that some dognitive scientists seem to have come to recently is that Muttsy has pretty much the same capacity you and I do, while our closest cousins, chimpanzees, don't. (Stanley Coren was in the news last spring, promoting the idea that dogs aren't just smarter than chimps, they also have better math and language skills than toddlers.)

If you think about it, the belief that dogs are smarter than chimps or toddlers challenges two of the most basic assumptions of modern mainstream science.

1) Consciousness is only a by-product of certain bio-energetic processesmost notably the firing of neuronstaking place inside a self-contained organ called the brain.

2) Evolution follows a specific course where, as organisms evolve into higher forms, they tend to become more and more developed, and their levels of development can be clearly seen in their anatomical features, including specific structures found within their brains.

On the evolutionary scale, we would place the canine, chimp, and human brain in that order canine > chimp > human in terms of relative size, the number of neurons they contain, and the various bells and whistles (neurological substructures) they each possess. 

So, logically speaking, in order for dogs to be "smarter" than chimps or toddlers, we'd either have to ignore the basic principles of evolution, or we'd have to redefine consciousness as something not entirely dependent on the number of neurons firing inside the brain.

Another problem is that these studies always seem to involve getting the dog to find a toy or treat, meaning he's asked to take part in a game involving the "search" aspect of his prey drive. And since dogs are group predators at heart, this means that if the dog's mind is already primed to follow whatever cues might help with the search for prey, it increases the likelihood that a dog will do what we want him to.

Meanwhile, if you were to simply point behind your dog, without first establishing a similar context of searching for a treat or a toy, and particularly if there was nothing actually there, the chances are good that your dog wouldn't look behind him. I've tested this myself with a few dozen dogs, where either I or their owners have pointed behind the dog and said, "[Dog's Name], look!" And so far none of them have been able to follow where we were pointing; they either gave us a blank stare, or looked for something directly in front of them.

My little "field study," as unscientific as it may be, involves a much a larger number of test subjects. Plus, the percentage of dogs that don't exhibit a ToM (100% so far) is much larger than the percentage that do when the tests are skewed by establishing the behavior in the context of a hunting game. 

This suggests that something besides a ToM may be at play.

While there are interesting, and possibly important aspects of Hare's work, there’s another problem. He keeps saying that wolves can’t learn to follow human cues when, in fact, recent research shows that they can. Dr. Monique Udell has shown that you simply have to spend some time letting the wolves “get to know you.” (Hare also skews his results by only allowing dogs who show an affinity for playing cooperative hunting games to be part of his studies.) 

This brings up another problem: the phenomenon of group consciousness, which is found in all social animals, but is seen most clearly and readily in how dogs form a kind of shared consciousness, both with other dogs and with their owners.

If we see the human/dog dynamic as a self-organizing system, it would make sense that, on a certain level, dogs would automatically be better at reading our signals (particularly if it involves their prey drive) than chimps would, because both dogs and humans have an evolutionary history that involves hunting large prey animals by working in concert. (That hunting-partner relationship still continues whenever we play with our dogs.)

One of the hallmarks of self-organizing systems is that the system is always smarter than the sum of its parts. So the fact that a dog's brain has less carrying capacity than oursfewer neurons, fewer bells and whistlesworks to his advantage. Once a dog has established a working relationship with us, he automatically becomes "smarter," not because he can think for himself, or has a ToM, but because that's how such systems operate. We bring our intellect and emotions to the relationship, dogs bring their intstincts and emotions. Emotion is the common ground.

One of my clients told me a story recently of how she and her husband and their boxer, Fancy, had come home from a walk and had gotten off the elevator. They expected Fancy to go racing to the front door the way she usually did. Instead she stayed right in front of the elevator, refusing to budge, no matter what they said or did.

They chalked this up to some kind of weird, "boxer disobedience." It was only after the husband put his key in the lock, found it wouldn't turn, then looked up at the number on the door, that he realized they'd gotten off on the wrong floor. Fancy wasn't disobeying after all. Her owners weren't paying attention to their surroundings, but she was! 

Here's my take on how and why this happened.

Initially, Fancy and her owners were in a group mind-set; they all had the same desire: to go home. To Fancy, when her owners got off on the wrong floor, and urged her to come with them anyway, they weren't acting in accordance with that desire, which is why she balked. She wasn't being disobedient; in fact she was quite faithfully obeying the group's shared desire to go home, despite the fact that her owners unwittingly kept urging her to do otherwise. 

I think dogs have an innate ability to tune in to the way we feel. But our mental thought processes would be similar to the static found between radio stations. And by tuning in to our feelings, dogs create an emotional channel between our minds and theirs. This enables them to influence the way we feel about them, which automatically changes the way we think as well. So when people tell me they can sometimes see a "thinking process" going on in their dogs' eyes, I would say that the dog's mind probably isn't adding and subtracting all the possible variables about what to do or how to act in a specific situation, she's probably behaving more like a radio dial, tuning in to the proper frequency that would put her and her owner on the same wavelength.

That's my thesis, anyway. 

 This wouldn't require us to rewrite the laws of evolution or neuroscience. We'd just have to see dogs from a slightly different point of view: theirs instead of ours.
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Footnotes:

1) Brian Hare seems to have co-opted my term "dognition" and applied it to his work. I could be wrong of course. He may have "coined" that term on his own, as I did.

2) Kevin Behan has also written about The Times article here.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

SeaWorld Is Giving Its Star Performers a Raw Deal

If Conditioning Is a Business Transaction, Orcas Are Getting Screwed
Originally published in slightly different form on March 10, 2010 at PsychologyToday.com.


It’s been three years since Dawn Brancheau was killed at SeaWorld by Tilikum, one of the orcas she worked with. Now a new documentary tells us what we pretty much already knew: being kept in a small tank is what turned this free-roaming cooperative hunter into a killer.

I’m not an expert on dolphins or killer whales, though I do know that orcas are one of only three types of mammal that routinely hunt animals that are larger and more dangerous than themselves (the others are wolves and human beings). So I’ll confine my remarks to what I think is relevant: the overall ineffectiveness of operant conditioning when it comes to asking an animal of any kind to suppress its instinctive needs and urges in trade for food rewards.

In my view, most of the initial commentary (or cover-up) on this tragedy missed the point.

Thad Lacinak, a former head trainer at SeaWorld, told ABC’s “Good Morning America-->” that he blamed Tilikum’s trainer, Dawn Brancheau, saying she made a mistake by letting her ponytail drift in the water in front of him. This idea was echoed in an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Whale May Have Seen Ponytail as Toy.” In that article, Lacinak was quoted as saying, “[The ponytail] was a novel item in the water, and he grabbed hold of it, not necessarily in an aggressive way. He’s like: ‘I'm going to play with you.’” 

This is disingenuous to say the least. On the one hand you have these highly intelligent animals, capable of extremely precise behaviors, not only in terms of the tricks they’re able to perform at amusement parks, but in how they interact with one another in the wild, particularly while playing or hunting. On the other, we’re supposed to believe that such an animal is capable of mistaking part of the human anatomy for a toy? What toys could they possibly be using that could be so easily mistaken for a ponytail?

The idea that Tilikum was “just playing” also contradicts eyewitness accounts of people who actually saw the attack in person (Lacinak didn’t). One witness said the orca was “thrashing her [Brancheau] around pretty good. It was violent.” Another said, “He shook her violently.” This particular witness had taken her children to SeaWorld numerous times, had seen the shows performed over and over, and knew Tilikum by sight. She had a clear sense of his usual behavior and personality, so it’s not as if she couldn't tell the difference between playfulness and violent aggression.

Plus all the whales were clearly agitated and upset on the day of the attack. The trainers had to cancel some of the scheduled performances because, as they told park visitors, "the whales were not cooperating." If that’s the case, this suggests that either they were very sick or that something very important was missing in the way that they’d been trained, particularly since in their native habitat, orcas are one of the most cooperative non-human animal species on the planet, ranking right up there with dogs and wolves.

Karen Pryor, who’s a key figurehead in the “positive” training movement, and who once trained dolphins for a living, defended SeaWorld’s training practices. “[The trainers at SeaWorld] have sophisticated training based on sound scientific principles.” Pryor went on to say, “That kind of animal is bound to be unpredictable.”

So Pryor is not blaming Dawn Brancheau, or SeaWorld’s training practices; she’s blaming Tilikum, because he’s unpredictable.

On Pryor’s website, the following message was posted. “Dolphins and [killer] whales are the first to be kept in captivity to be trained by truly modern, force-free methods as opposed to avoidance training or the traditional ‘do as I say or else’ way. Sea World has mastered ways of training without using fear or force, setting what we believe to be the gold standard for humane and intelligent training.”

This is all very good, yet it’s also the kind of blind-faith, behavioral science propaganda that really gets me steamed. It always comes down to the moral superiority of operant conditioning over traditional methods, rather than oc’s actual effectiveness. 

“Yes,” they’re saying, “operant conditioning didn’t work with Tilikum, but we’re still the 'gold standard’” So what exactly is this gold standard that failed Tilikum and got Dawn killed?

In another article, this one in the Milford Daily News, Pryor compared operant conditioning to a business transaction, saying the trainer trades something the animal wants—such as food, praise, a head rub, or a toy—for a behavior the trainer wants the animal to produce. Pryor says this mimics “the way animals learn, out in nature.” 

That’s the problem. Operant conditioning is not based on the way animals learn in nature. It's a synthetic version of learning, based primarily on the way animals learn and behave in a lab. No animal in nature has the time or conveniences for learning new behaviors one at a time. That can get a wild animal killed in no time flat.

And that’s just half the problem. The other half is that if learning really is like a business transaction, then the orcas (and other animals, like pet dogs) are getting a raw deal. Anyone who actually thought about this for more than half-a-second would know that there is no way that doing tricks for a pailful of fish or a head rub could ever hope to equal—in terms of an orca’s natural energy exchange with the environment—the process of traveling roughly 500 miles a week, through open water, to chase and kill prey animals (gray, baleen, and, rarely, sperm whales), that may be more than three times their own size.

So the gold standard used to teach these animals tricks is simply not geared toward releasing the amounts of energy these huge predators need to release daily in order to feel satisfied and relaxed. That’s why operant conditioning methods can't help but fail in the crunch, as they did three years ago in Orlando.

Evolutionary biologist Ray Coppinger, when discussing the flaws inherent to applying the dominance paradigm to training pet dogs, said that even though the alpha theory held prominence within the scientific community for a very long time, “No one really believed in it. The data wasn't there.” Here we have the opposite. The experimental data is on the side of operant conditioning. And yet time after time it proves itself to be critically ineffective, and in some cases inhumane.

In a perfect worldwhere operant conditioning was really effective, all the time with all species, behavioral scientists wouldn’t need to solve behavioral problems in dogs by prescribing drugs. And no dog owner would be told that whenever a dog’s prey drive prevents him from obeying, all you have to do is “Up the value of your treats!”

And in this perfect world I’m wishing for, Dawn Brancheau might still be alive. From all reports, and from looking at the footage of her working with the animals she trained, this was an intelligent, energetic, caring, and dedicated animal lover. The only thing she did wrong was to trust in and believe the hype about behavioral science.

Thats not to say that the operant conditioning model is totally and completely ineffective. Its not. I use it all the time myself (at least I often use something that seems quite similar). I just don't fool myself into thinking its the be-all and end-all of dog training. It’s one tool. That’s all it is.

I think it’s time not only to re-think the advisability of keeping marine mammals in small tanks and forcing them to do tricks for treats (really—how smart is that?), we need to start start looking at animal behavior in the way Pryor suggests, as a simple business transaction. Once we do, we’ll see that for an animal that routinely hunts animals three times its own size, out in the open water, the orcas are getting a really bad bargain when all they're given to do with their energy each day is a few tricks for treats.

They need something more. That’s what Tilikum was trying to tell us. It’s a shame that Dawn Brancheau, along with her friends and family, had to suffer. But if this tragedy is to have any meaning, we'd better stop a moment and listen to what this killer has to say.

LCK
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