espencer
you still have to learn a lot about dogs ... it actually is the opposite. In
the wild, an animal that only goes with "feeling things out" was dead
yesterday. An animal that takes decisions based on feelings is food for other
animals, an animal that bases his decisions on mental thought processes gets to
eat every day. But dont take from me to say that dogs are intelligent and have
mental thought processes, here are 4 examples:
Hi, Espencer,
Thanks for the feedback. I enjoyed looking at the videos.
In re your first point: when I spoke of "feeling things out" I was
referring to a quick, down-and-dirty (i.e., cognitively simple) way of
processing information. I've used that phrase in other places to denote the
difference between what we automatically think we see when there's a gap in the action, i.e., a lull between a
stimulus and a dog's response: we automatically impute a linear thought process
into that gap, when in fact the lull is more likely to be caused by a dog
making a choice based on emotion and pattern recognition than rational
thought.
I like this description of the power and speed of pattern recognition (from
a paper on social science):
"The long term memory used in
pattern recognition ... is effectively unlimited in capacity and
works very quickly -- on the order of seconds [I would say
"nano-seconds" -LCK] -- even when solving series of complex associative recall
problems across thousands of potential matches.
"The human brain evolved with a
strong bias towards pattern recognition rather than deductive reasoning. The
biological world ... is exceedingly complex and arbitrary. It is a world of
individuals constructed from complex feature vectors made of DNA, with billions
of components, and selected solely by the ability of their ancestors to
reproduce ... Such a world cannot be described deductively in any practical
sense, but because it is very repetitive, pattern recognition is an effective
information-processing strategy. Since critical decisions must be made in real
time ... evolution will select for high recall speeds under noisy environmental
conditions. It does not select for theorem proving...
"This neural bias [for pattern
recognition] would emerge early in the biological record, well before the
development of primates, or mammals, or even vertebrates. Homo sapiens is
endowed with sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities honed through eons
of evolution, and it is unsurprising that this capacity is put to use in social
behavior. Deductive reasoning, in contrast, is a comparatively recent
development and is much more difficult. While we are very proud of deductive
reasoning, it is not necessarily more useful ...
"Anderson and Rosenfeld trace the
pedigree of this idea to William James: As James points out [in Psychology
(Briefer Course) (1890)]
emphatically in several places, the brain is not constructed to think
abstractly - it is constructed to ensure survival in the world. ... [The design
principles are:] do as good a job as you can, cheaply, and with what you can
obtain easily. If this means using ad hoc solutions, with less generality than
one might like, so be it. We are living in one particular world, and we are
built to work in it and with it. (Anderson and Rosenfeld 1988, 1)
"Pattern recognition, unlike
deduction, is easy."
("A New Kind of Social Science," Valerie M. Hudson, Brigham
Young University, Philip A. Schrodt, University of Kansas, 2004)
I hope that clears up why I've said and why I think that pattern recognition is
quicker and more adaptive than reason or rational thought.
Now to the videos you posted links to: First of all, there is no evidence that the dogs (or
wild dogs) in these clips are forming the intent to report information. At least I don't see it. The closest you
might come would be in the video of the the cape hunting dogs. It's true that,
esp. in the overhead shot, where every other dog peels off from the main path,
it seems very much as if some behaviors would have to be based on some form of deliberate signaling
going back and forth. However, ants exhibit similar behavioral patterns, and do so as
part of a self-emergent system. One of the rules of emergence theory is
"the dumber the parts, the smarter the system." I think it's also important to note that self-emergent systems depend heavily on both pattern recognition and instantaneous feedback mechanisms.
A very simple explanation for their behavior, based on physics and emotion, is that the
target deer, being a large animal, poses a danger to each individual
member of the pack. That danger would ordinarily be felt, viscerally, as resistance registering within the body of each dog. However, since they're part of a pack, that feeling is diffused across the pack as a whole, so that each member only feels a
much smaller portion of it.
When the deer starts running, it becomes an attractor (a term taken from
emergence theory). Each dog's levels of attraction (and whatever residual
resistance is retained) to the deer will differ, otherwise they would all
take most direct course and get in each others' way. So their movements
automatically become synchronized around the deer-as-attractor, through their
individuated levels of attraction and resistance. (If I were to draw this as a
graphic video, you'd see fields of a kind of biological magnetic force around
the deer and each dog's body; those fields would shift and fluctuate naturally
depending on the changes in proximity to the prey, to each other, changes in
the terrain, etc.)
The rapidity at which this takes place (despite some of the slo-mo photography)
would make it impossible for the dogs to be engaging in reason-based, conscious
communication with one another. (They may very well communicate with eye
contact, but that kind of communication would have to be limited to an
emotional, not a linear, thought-based form.)
It's interesting that you've included the hunting behaviors of the African
wild dogs, because in each of the 4 videos the answer to the puzzle can
actually be traced back to the dog's hunting instincts, at least partially. For instance, if we
take a step back, remove our automatic reflex to see human-like thought in each
of the examples, we can see that pattern-recognition (at a very high level) is
involved with how the Doberman arranges his toys (or prey objects), and with
how the border collie "understands the names" of over 100 of his prey
objects (I would say that for him they're not "names" but behavioral cues). Neither dog is forming the deliberate intent to report information to
anyone, though. In fact, just off the top of my head, it seems to me that what they're exhibiting could reasonably be explained
as a kind of low-level OCD-like behavior, a condition which each breed is susceptible
to. (Nicholas Dodman says he and some others have found the gene that codes for
OCD in blanket-sucking Dobermans; there's also a topographical connection to where both OCD and pattern recognition are processed in the brain,
which suggests that the internal "reward" system which makes the act
of detecting patterns feel good, may be part of the process that actually
causes OCD in the first place, or at least that self-reinforces the behaviors.)
I'm not saying that Donnie and Rico aren't amazing dogs. They are. But I still think their
behaviors can be traced back to some aspect of the prey drive. Donnie's
is particularly interesting because, as you noted, of the way he placed one toy
with its arm around another. There is another explanation for that behavior,
other than that Donnie was "reporting information" to his
owner that he needed a hug. ("Ahhh...";) It's far more likely that he was expressing his emotions, and he was also quite
probably retrieving his owner's unconscious emotions as well. I've already written
an article on this phenomenon, in which I provide anecdotes about
several dogs who seemed to have done just that:
"Emotional
GPS: How Dogs Find and Retrieve Our Unconscious Desires."
As for the video showing several studies with how dogs are
genetically-designed to make eye contact with humans, follow our gaze, etc.,
there's also no evidence that the dogs are reporting information in any of
these clips. Are the dogs "thinking?" I don't think so. The only
situation where we might rightly apply thought is the one where the researcher
puts down a treat, tells the dog not to get it, then closes her eyes. Once her
eyes are closed, the dog takes a moment (to feel things out), then grabs the
treat. What was his motivation? That she "couldn't see him?" -- which
strongly implies a first level Theory of Mind? Or is there another, simpler
explanation? (Emotional GPS again?)
As I wrote in the first article in this series on canine communication,
"There are three ways in which dogs are said to communicate with other
dogs, as well as with human beings; through their body language,
vocalizations, and direct eye contact." So far I've only dealt with body
langauge. But eye contact (which will be the final installment) may be the most interesting topic of all.
In another clip, the dog is told to go and beg one of three people for a treat. Two of the people have their eyes hidden. Does the dog go directly to the girl, whose eyes are clearly visible? No. It goes to the tallest person first, then the next tallest, then the shortest. Another thing that isn't pointed out by the narrator, is that in the first two cases the dog seems to be waiting for some kind of reaction or cue from the people with their eyes hidden. Is the dog thinking, "This person can't see me?" Or is it not getting the necessary feedback to complete the given task? (Remember, feedback mechanisms are an important component of self-emergent systems.)
When dogs interact with us, or with other dogs, are they picking up
information from reading signals from our eyes, our body language, and words and emotional tones of voice? Yes, of
course. But I don't know why that has to automatically mean they're thinking
thing through.
LCK
Another term for pattern recognition is "intuitive coherence
judgments," which has been studied in humans, and is explained as follows:
"We conceive of intuition as the ability to make
above-chance judgments about properties of a stimulus on the basis of
information that is activated in memory but not consciously retrieved.
Intuition is thus not some special or even mysterious capacity, but is rather
based on preexisting knowledge that may guide decisions and judgments without
being accessible to conscious awareness." ("On the speed of intuition:
Intuitive judgments of semantic coherence under different response deadlines,"
Annette Bolte, Braunschweig University of Technology, and Thomas Goschke,
Dresden University of Technology, The Journal of Memory & Cognition, 2005, (7) 1248, 1255)
So you see, a lot of really cool stuff takes place on an unconscious level,
even in humans.