PSY362 Midterm Review PSY362 – Lecture 1 Cognition is: The mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store, and act on information in the environment. Can’t be learned. Often reserved for the manipulation of declarative, rather than procedural knowledge, and is a mental representation of information. Unconscious Learning – Implicit Memory -subject sees list of words: elephant, telephone, assassin, automobile -followed by distractor task -fill in the blank: e_e_ph____. Unconsciously you will remember, whether or not you remmeber seeing it. -a memory illusion: false but convincing memory -memory is reconstructive – we extract the gist to make things easier to remember (but this may contribute to memory errors) Declarative Knowledge: “knowing that” ex: home burrow is south of that big rock Intelligence of Animals -crows were able to distinguish between walnut type and type of surface theyd be dropping the walnut on. They also take into consideration other crows that may be around. -the main thing the research here is trying to resolve is whether or not these animals are rational -the word intelligent needs to be used carefully and with respect to a specific goal Tinbergen’s Four Questions: (immediate causation, development, function, evolution) 1) Cause of behaviour? 2) How does development influence the behaviour? 3) What is the behaviour good for? 4) How did this behaviour evolve? Historical Perspective -early philosophers thought that humans were the only rational creatures on a level of their own. Descartes examined behavior in terms of a machine. -Dualism is the idea put forth by Descartes that humans have a non material soul as well as a material body, where the soul governs behaviour through a point of contact such as pineal gland. -Perhaps animals cannot think because language is necessary for comprehending universals, and since they cannot think about themselves, animals are not rational agents – sure we can condition them to do good, but they don’t truly understand what is good. Phenotypic Plasticity: the fact that individuals within a species may develop different physical and or behavioural phenotypes in different environments Evolution -all animals are related through evolution, psychological as well as physical characteristics evolve through natural selection -“evolution is a process of change in the proportion of heritable traits within a population spread over many generations” 1) trait must be heritable 2) having that trait should help make you more sufficient to reproduce -Darwin also believed that there are no differences between man and higher mammals fundamentally in their mental capacities, based on similarities such as senses, learning Two Current approaches to Animal Cognition -Anthropocentric (centered on humans) -uses animals to help understand humans, with few species used as “animal models” for experiments in the lab -3 important characteristics: 1) Focus: tends to be on things that are humanlike in nature, such as information processing, memory, etc. 2) Comparative: should be implicitly comparative, these animals are compared with humans 3) Scalar: there is an idea of hierarchy, a ladder of improvement in terms of how well an animals is such as a worm being on the lowest and an ape at the highest. Anthropomorphic: explaining animals behaviour in terms of human-like thinking and reasoning Case of Clever Hans -Could tap his hoof to answer simple questions, with his speciality being in math. -turns out the horse was actually just amazing at picking up confirmation cues such as nods, cheers, and then would just stop tapping his hoof. Thorndike and the Experimental Approach -test plausible alternative to anthropomorphic interpretations -puzzle box experiment: places cats in a puzzle box and they needed to move certain levers and pull stuff to get out, however he saw no signs of insight for this learning, but rather saw the cat learn through trial and error -Thorndike believed animals could learn behaviour and new habits through the pairing of actions and rewards -learning by trial and error, not by imitation and insight Morgan’s Cannon: “In no case may we intepret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale”. Essentially we need to find the simplest possible answer. Cognitive Specialization: Clark’s Nutcracker – extremely stupid birds, except for their exceptionally good spatial memory in which they derive food from roughly 1000 caches. Problem 2: Intelligence suggests that cognition is a single process, ex: Clark’s Nutcracker, there is more than once concept of intelligence. -other problems include the idea of ranking is wrong, implies evolution is a ladder to phylogenetic scale, problems with the idea of intelligence Ecological Approach (relevant to an animal within its environment) -Also called cognitive ecology: how do animals solve problems in nature, look at a lot of different species, thus becoming more biological -emphasises how animals use cognition in the wild, includes use of explicitly comparative studies to analyze cognitive abilities -right to the level of our neurons we function at the same way as other animals like a fruit fly, seen in giving the fruit fly a drug that affected their genes and proteins relevant to memory to enhance their ability to learn and make associations from 20 trials to 2. -other types of advancing animal intelligence include spatial knowledge with bees, social knowledge, animal communication, animal self-awareness PSY362 Lecture 2 -we need to determine if these facts really support an idea and convey some understanding that this behaviour/conclusion really does capture some type of cognitive ability and if it can be translated -convey how the researchers arrived at their conclusion, we are being evaluated on how well we understand the article and our analysis of how the empirical evidence relates to the relevant cognitive entity Perception and Adaptation How’s: intrinsic features of perception and attention drive the characteristic traits we see Why’s: comparison of behaviour amongst species Perception is a product of the stimuli received, and the sensory and neural structures involved in the process of perception (how the structures in our brains process it). The tiny part of the environment which is perceived after sensory and central filtering = “Umwelt” – some piece of information that you are trying to capture, the unique experience that every individual has to the perception of an object, such as colour. The perception of colour is more than just the physical property of an object, but more involves what kind of electromagnetic information is being represented in our brains. We not only need to consider what animals perceive, but we must also be aware of what animals perceive in their own environments. Animals who are unable to perceive colour, are not able to cogniscient of it. Every animal must be able to respond appropriately to it’s own food, mates, predators. Spatial Frequency: our ability to judge distinctions between light and dark. Physical and environmental constraints likely shape differences in features. For example, ethologists noticed that predators tend to have their eyes more at the front of their face, maximizing binocular images. Conversely, prey typically have their eyes more at the side of their head, maximizing the total amount of space that can be seen at any one time. Studying Perception in Animals 1) Psychophysics: can you detect it? (perception), can you perceive differences? (sensitivity). Refers to using behaviour to gather information about what is in an animals awareness. Limit of perception (sensitivity), would be being unable to determine the difference between a C and an O, so a letter chart is an example of psychophysics. 2) Habituation: measuring the difference between an old stimulus and new cue suggest that the animal can perceive the difference. 3) Electrophysiology: recording the activity of cells, not always good because you can tell that a neuron is firing but how do you know that directly relates to perception Perception can play a role in physical characteristics, such as a chameleon perceiving the environment and changing their skin to camoflauge. Perception and Evolution: Sensory Ecology Sensory Ecology: how the senses of an animal develop in relation to its environment -bats fly well in pitch black room -bats scan their surroundings with self-generated ultrasounds and detect the reflected sounds -when comparing successful flights in bats for a food reward, covering ears, mouth, eyes, or eyes and ears, all areas except covering their eyes rendered significantly less successful flights. Only covering their eyes resulted in something above the control a bit. -moths (some of them) have developed a type of ear, with auditory receptors that are able to pick up on A1 and A2 ultrasound. They detect ultrasonic frequencies, sensitive to intensity (A1=low, A2=high) which works perfectly for detecting their bat predators. Search and Attention -Sensory Bias and Sexual Selection Darwin suggested Natural Selection (survivability), and Sexual Selection (reproduction) as two opposing forces in some animals. -the force of sexual selection outweighs that of natural selection. Preferred male character need not be correlated with preferred male quality. An example of where these two conflict is in the peacock, where natural selection would suggest a shorter tail to enhance survivability, and sexual selection a longer more colourful tail. These two would combine to result into an optimum selection. Sensory Bias Theory: there must have been some sort of arbitrary bias to get preferential selection started 1) Predicts female sexual preferences evolved before male characters 2) A preference expressed in a sexual context may have a function in another context such as feeding or predator avoidance Behavioural Ecology of Attention -the idea that animals might search selectively, ignoring items that do not match a mental representation of desired prey, is appealing because it agrees so well with introspection. It is possible that we could be looking right at something but if it is not part of our awareness we don’t even notice it. Search Images and Prey Evolution -blue jay test: trained to notice a digital moth, could appear on either of two screens which happened 50% of all trials, and if there was no moth they would have to peck at the green disc in the middle of the two screens -there were hundreds of virtual moths and every time the blue jay got the moth and pecked at it when it appeared, that moth would be removed from the database. -in 3 repeats of the experiment, the most cryptic version of the moth came to dominate in the population. As more difficult moths got caught, easier ones were found more often, priming detection. -frequency dependent selection: as a type of prey becomes more frequent it is proportionally more preyed upon, if prey is rare for any reason it enhances survivability. -support for search imaging: the jays performance improved within same type runs as opposed to mixed runs, based on distinguishing features as opposed to search item itself. Search Image: selective search for animals, typically in terms of prey Feature Integration Theory: objects are perceived as the sum of individual primary features such as colour and shape that co-occur at the same time and place. Many universal principles of perception reflect the organization of the physical world. To understand how behaviour is controlled selectively by only some parts of the environment at any given time, it is necessary to understand attention. Summary: all sensory systems studied share: 1) greater response to more intense stimuli 2) sensitivity to contrast 3) Weber’s Law: 4) tendency to habituate Linking Behaviour, Adaptation, and the Brain (Chapter 2) -everything looks like an adaptation, almost everything seems like it is a product of evolution -Darwin believed that the eye was the only thing that could completely ruin his idea of natural selection. “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Possibly: 1) an animal had pigmented cells on their skin that could detect light 2) a depression/pocket formed with these pigmented cells which was advantageous because it allow direction to be determined (at least slightly) 3) this depression developed that further enhanced direction, and ability to detect light advanced if this depression began to be filled with water 4) a cornea would develop to then close and protect off this area, and continue to advance -this is of course just a story, a possibility if we needed to isolate eyes down to selective pressure -Demonstrations that a behaviour serves a particular function, increases confidence in the hypohthesis that the behaviour has contributed to its evolution. -Observation: Gulls remove empty shells from the nest, exposing chicks to predation risk. Why? Perhaps the white inside broken shells attract predators and removing them helps save their young and protect against predation. But perhaps we should not expect that everything has evolved perfectly and there is not always an answer. -If true, perhaps we could compare this behaviour against related birds who live in different environments. -Kittiwakes nest on cliffs avoiding several natural predators, and interestingly enough they do NOT remove broken shells from the nest. The Comparative Approach to Understanding Behaviour -comparative test consists of obtaining lots of data from different species and relating it to the species in question -is essential when looking at evolution for whether an important selection pressure has produced similar patterns across many species Allometry: refers to the principle that animals with bigger bodies have on average bigger body parts. Phylogeny: study of the reconstruction of the tree of life, branching relationships among species during evolution Homoplasies: birds and bats are homoplasies, evolving from different ancestors yet converged on a similar shape due to common selection pressures Systematic Variation: testing animals under several values of relevant contextual variables in an effort to eliminate contextual variables. Instead of varying factors within a given task, vary the tasks. Structure of Behaviour Systems: Stimuli Perceptual Mechanisms Central Mechanisms Motor Mechanisms Behaviour Belding Ground Squirrels: these squirrels work by alerting the group when a predator is nearby, so for example numerous squirrels will set up in an area and monitor, calling out if a predator is nearby so everyone is alerted. -females by far are the ones who call out the most. This perhaps reflects the fact that males travel further from the birthplace by far as opposed to females who stay super close and are likely more genetically similar with those around them. - these squirrels actually will make the effort to call out and alert others that are genetically closer and within their immediate family – anything outside their immediate relatives they call significantly less - we have a functional explanation for why they do this, and a comparative approach to determine when and why they do this (they do it more for genetically closer relatives) Costly Brains -brains should be functionally specific – the larger the brain, the more metabolically costly, and thus animals should tend to be highly specialized. -Foraging Intelligence Hypothesis: proposes fruit eating species need excellent spatial and temporal learning abilities for tracking the locations and ripeness of items that are scattered widely throughout the forest -Systematic Intelligence Hypothesis: animals living in large groups need to keep track of the identities of large numbers of individuals and their interactions There is a relationship between body weight and brain weight. There is also a relative volume of brain region – ration of the brain region to some other brain or body part. Executive Brain Ration: Executive Brain / Brain Stem Concerted/Mosaic Development: whether brain size evolves as a whole or through selection on particular parts. Innovation Rate: significant for evolution because it predicts whether a species will become established when introduced into a new environment Encapsulation: system is impenetrable to information from other systems A task that shows chimps have the capacity for culture and learning by training one chimp to lift a lever for food vs. poking a button for food and putting these experts in different groups, the newbies in each individual group will learn to copy the lever chimp from the reward, and the others will learn from the button poking chimp. The Principle of Proper Mass -the more important a function is for a species, the more brain area will be devoted to it -behaviour reflects sensory, motor, and motivational mechanisms. Comparing the telencephalon or the cerebral cortex of the brain believed to be responsible for higher cognitive processes. Food Storing and the Brain -the brains of food-storing birds provide one example related to cognition. In baby marsh tits (food-storers) and baby blue tits (non-storers), the whole brain grows rapidly in the first few weeks after hatching -the marsh tits hippocampus continues to grow into adulthood Adaptationist Viewpoint -mechanisms or modules will evolve when the problems a species needs to solve are difficult and require different, functionally incompatible computations -no organism is a blank state, but rather preorganized to process information in species appropriate ways -focuses on the comparison of close relatives chosen for having different behaviours -to test if something is adapative: modelling, comparing, experimenting Neuroecology -correlating features doesn’t show us how the brain works, but rather what it allows the animal to do -one prediction is that distinguishable cognitive mechanisms will evolve whenever the information-rpocessing problems a species has to solve require different, functionally incompatible, kinds of computations PSY362 – Lecture 3 -We will only be covering up to 4.4.2! Ignore Chapter 5! Learning -learning is the ability to acquire a neuronal representation of new information Hebb: first to describe learning on a synaptic scale. Thought that the formation of memory involves persistent changes in synapses, the change in strength between two cells’ connection is what determines learning. -if the stimulus reliably produces a response, the strength of the physiological response increases -if a neuron does not reliably produce a response or fails to produce a response, one must think that the physiological response decreases -the salience of an event plays a role in determining how well you remember an event and how significant the connection becomes Eric Kandel: establish a link between synaptic connections and behaviours. Drew the link between neuronal change and behaviour change. -studied sea slugs because they are very good at sensory reflexes of withdrawal that can be modified by learning -these aplysia are good at responding efficiently to any threat of a predator -Gill Siphon Withdrawal Reflex: when touching the gill siphon it will withdraw and come out within 10 or so seconds, yet to test learning by administering shocks to these animals, these animals may withdraw their gill siphon for 45 seconds. -conversely, if you continually poke it with a pencil causing no harm, eventually the aplysia just learns not to really care anymore and it habituates. -used these sea slugs instead of other animals that display basic learning characteristics because they have giant neurons that are visible to the naked eye which allow easier recording Sensitization: increased response to stimuli following the presentation of a prominent stimulus Habituation: decreased response to a stimulus following the repeated presentation of that stimulus Animal Behaviour -guided by instincts: rather inflexible, inborn behaviour, much more complex than reflexes. An example is a spider spinning a perfect web on their first try, or possums playing dead. -advantages: no experience is required, low cost of neuronal mechanisms – learning requires resources, energy, and time, sets the stage for future experiences in their environment -costs: when you must learn as opposed to using innate instinct, essentially optimal behaviour is compromised because there is still a learning process occurring. An example is the yellow eyed birds who must learn to forage individually When and how will learning evolve? -when would learning or instincts be more favourable? -depends on stability of environment not only in individuals lifetime, but also for the next generation, can be classified as varying resources or stable resources Within Lifetime Predictability vs. Between Generation Predictability -in environments with low for each, or low within lifetime, high between generation, Stevens believed we should ignore experience. -even if both situations are high in predictability he still believed an animal should ignore experience because it allowed them to conserve cognitive resources and operate on a more basic instinctual level. A perfect example: the mother goose who will place any similar object to an egg near the nest into their nest and sit on it as if its an egg, having to learn what an egg is may lead to errors at some point and thus a real egg may be lost. -High within-lifetime predictability, but low between-generation predictability is the only time where learning would be recommended, because from one day to the next they can use their learning yet it is clear that with low between generation predictability that innate responses may not be the best suited Bumblebees and Flowers -different flower species have different amounts of nectar, and different areas have different plant species. The bumblebee smaples different species and learns, which makes learning adaptive for the bumblebee. Learning Evolved to Enhance Fitness Do grasshoppers gain froim learning? Conducted an experiment comparing growth rate in grasshoppers that could learn or could not learn. -in the learning environment, created an optimal diet that had a green card attached to it and cinnamon scent. The deficient food had a different scent and a brown card. In the learning condition these cues were kept constant, and on the same side of the cage. -in the random treatment, they faced a changing environment to make learning impossible where cues were changed day to day meal to meal. -results: proportion of visits to balanced diet was significantly higher for those grasshoppers that were able to learn. Also higher for the learning group was proportion of time that was spent at the good food. Learning allowed a 20% higher growth rate! Ended up correlating to larger eggs and more eggs, leading to healthier offspring and higher reproductive success, signifying that learning leads to an adaptation process! Classical Conditioning -psychic secretions, salivations from white lab coat -unconditional stimulus, unconditional response, pair something neutral to stimulus known as conditional stimulus, eventually eliciting the conditioned response -ability of bell to evoke salivation (CR), was attributed to the transfer of control of a reflex (UR of salivation), from the innate eliciting stimulus of food (US), to the initially neutral stimulus of the bell (CS) Pavlovian conditioning is seen as a case of associative learning, the formation of some sort of mental connection between representations of two stimuli. This is because it is learning resulting from procedures involving contingincies between events, as well as the fact the association is either excitatory or inhibitory links between event representations. This conditioning can help further research because: 1) providing a model for how other learning can be studied 2) some conditioning examples have interesting cognitive content 3) how is other learning different from conditioning? 4) basic phenomena of conditioning is so basic and widespread, as this provides a great way of determining associations, it provides insight into other forms of learning. -remains powerful candidate explanations for any example of naturalistic learning in any species -blocking: light = food, a tone + light will not pair the tone with food, instead the tone will only be learned if there is a change in the US, such as increased or reduced food -popping balloons, blinking/startle reflex, counting down to 3, blinking reflex…not necessarily the same UR and CR, think of the CR has preparedness to benefit the animal, thus in your interest to be ready to blink. Phenotypic Plasticity: is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. Such as caterpillars changing their patterns in response to what they eat when they are first born to blend in with their surroundings better. Learning is biologically relevant -over time, the effect of certain drugs requires increased dosage to elicit the same effect -behavioural indication of tolerance in rats measured an analgesic effect in rats, rats that took saline will notice the pain from the warming pad roughly 3 times faster than those rats given morphine -over a period of time, giving the same amount of morphine to a rat will eventually barely elicit a response to the point where they are on par with the saline group -tolerance to alcohol-induced hypothermia: alcohol reduces body temperature, but as alcohol is continuously administered in rats their body temperature will not drop as much indiciating a physiological tolerance therefore increased dose is needed for same effect -conditional hypothermia: -situational-specificity of tolerance: rats were given a high dose of heroin where 96% died, tolerant rats given heroin in the same yellow room were more likely to survive than in a different room blue, to a near double survival rate. Taking the rats and putting them into a completely new environment was similar to giving them the original high. -even in coffee, a tolerant coffee drinker may have a small effect to caffeine through drinking it, but inject the caffeine and the effect will be large Learning is stereotypical… Rescorla-Wagner Model: When a CS and US are paired, the change in the strength of their association, AV, increased proportionally to the learning rate, x, and the difference between the maximum strength possible, m, and current strength, v AV = x (m – v) -captured how learning occurs in organisms, relatively dominant throughout all animals -accounts for blocking, and overshadowing ( learning elements together equates to less learning than if they were trained alone) potentiation (opposite of overshadowing, ex. flavour and odor) Assume we are using a light to signal food to a dog for the first time -Associative Strength = knowledge of association, = 0 -Maximum Strength = 100 -Rate of Learning = .10 (should take roughly 10 trials to obtain maximum strength) Of course, animals may learn less in subsequent trials as they approach their maximum strength. Therefore, this can be represented in the formula as: Trial #1: 10 points earned. Trial #2: .1(100-10) = 9 points earned Trial #3: .1(100-19) = 8.1 points earned. The limitation with this is that it assumes every organism learns thing in the exact same way, at the exact same pace. Learning is selective… -learning should be under strong selective pressure, favouring individuals who learn the appropriate cues that are useful in their particular environment. Animals should not just go around pairing everything together, but should rather be learning in some way that favours them in their environment. -animals should be predisposed to learn cues relevant to their environment. Rats would lick a spigot to get tasty water, rigged to have an alarm go off and light go on as they drank the water. -Half the rats from drinking the water would get nauseous, the other half would get shocked when they licked the spout. -Rats that were given the toxin and made sick, turned out the audiovisual cues had no effect on the rats and their willingness to drink water. However, the taste of the water alone resulted in the rats dropping off their water intake by 50%, showing that the rats are being selective in the cues paid attention too -Rats that were shocked showed a greater aversion to drinking water during the audiovisual cues, whereas taste did not effect the rats likeliness to drink water -Shows it is not just any two cues put together, but rather animals have innate predispositions for assocating certain stimuli with certain states. Taste is a more relevant cue to the quality of food, while noise and visual cues are more relevant to cues that cause physical harm. Lecture 4 Midterm: 20-30 M/C + 4-6 Short Answer, will NOT go outside lecture concepts. Chapter 6 will NOT be on the test. Chapter 5 is NOT on the test. Chapter 4 modification still applies. Theory of Mind Article: monkey goes for banana only if he sees that the alpha monkey doesn’t see it first. Memory -defined as a new neuronal acquisition that can be used for a subsequent representation. Deals with how information is stored, retained, and retrieved. Learning has traditionally dealt with how information about relationships between defense is acquired. -two variables predicting the likelihood that information will be needed or how often it was needed is practice and retention interval -3 questions: what are the conditions on which memory is retained, what are the contents of the memory, what are the effects of memory on behaviour Animal Memory: Current Views -Metacognition in animals: -Are animals aware of their memories? -Do animals have episodic memory? The Basics: -Habituation: if behaviour toward an eliciting stimulus changes from one occasion to the next, and if motivational and sensory causes of the change can be ruled out, information about the earlier presentation MUST have been in stored in MEMORY. When you habituate to something, you pay less attention to it. -downside is that it can only be used for arrays that evoke a well-defined response -Ex: Exposure 1, prism and cylinder with gray background, Exposure 2 flip the objects with grid background, Exposure 3 prism and prism with gray background, because animals tend to pay less attention to stimuli they are used too in their environment, if they attend to the new prism in exposure 3 it suggests episodic memory because they are noticing the change in the environment. Delayed Matching to Sample: -priming phase: one central spot luminated with one particular colour. Bird must peck at the colour to signal they are aware that the colour is there. -retention interval: 0 seconds to a few minutes, then the birds are shown two colours, one on each side of the now blank central piece, and they are given reinforcement for pecking the one that matches the sample. -100-300 trials, retention interval (how long we make the birds wait), and presentation time (how long the central stimuli was displayed for) affect performance time. As we increase retention interval and decrease presentation time, birds’ performance drops. Comparative test of delayed response: -first major research program designed to compare memory in species in a systematic way -animals are put in a delay chamber, with 3 boxes where 1 lights up and the animal is unable to move. The animal is restrained, after they are able to exit the delay chamber to go to the correct box to obtain a food reward, supposed to show memory Memory for places past: Spatial Memory in Rats -radial maze: can explore any of the 8 cups in the radial made doing 1 of 2 things – either searching for food, OR avoiding a location because they’ve already been there -the radial maze has had contextual cues along the maze -rats avoid foraging in locations they’ve already visited -rats could remember the maze really well even up to 4 hours of delay, however performance tends to drop significantly after this period. Why do rats seem to outperform all others? -the effects of natural vs. unnatural tasks (foraging is more natural to a rat than pecking at a colour) -the potential for interference in memory (there may be interference for the pigeon due to the mass amount of trials back to back to back..these rats have had 7 days to become acquainted with the maze, potentially bolstering their memory) -this lends weight to the enormous difficulty sometimes occurring with memory and memory retrieval events, as well as using species specific tasks Comparing species on cognitive tasks: other approaches -vary the task: use multiple tasks -matching in pigeons and corvids -the ecological approach: memory in foodstore inverts Ecological Approach by Comparing Species -compare close or distant relatives to see if cognitive abilities match ecology -use a variety of different kinds of tests of the same ability Food Storing Corvids -4 species from Southwest USA (Arizona, New Mexico) -Clark’s Nutcracker is the Star: buries thousands of seed caches for the winter -Pinyon Jay: stores less food -Scrub Jay & Mexican Jay: store the least Food Storing in the Brain: food-storing birds have higher hippocampal volume in relationship to their body mass than non food-storing birds (2nd point missed) Delayed Matching Tasks -pinyon jays were best at retention intervals for matching colour, but does this mean they have a better memory than clark’s nutcrackers, or perhaps did the nutcracker not do as well because for certain species memories of colour is not that important -when it comes to location matching tasks, the nutcracker easily shined even with the greatest retention interval in effect. -analyzing the birds again using a radial maze, clark’s nutcracker tended to do the best but the other birds were close – it all depends on the test and the species etc. -contextual cues always matter: nutcracker in its environment will find food months later, whereas the retention interval here was 60s. grouping together different memory tasks may reveal ideas and differences in groups, but they should still be taken limitedly. Baboons, birds remember thousands of photos.. -shown plenty of random photos suited to their visual capabilities, trained to respond if they have seen the photo before -analyzing the percent of correct responses as a function of # of items in the memory set. -baboons have roughly a 80% recall rate after seeing 6,000 images. -pigeons are also decent, storing 800-1000 images until their performance drops below -evidence for long-term memory capacity in baboons and pigeons, baboons can go 50,000 images while still reporting at 70%, pigeons can go about 25,000 images at 65% When you know it, you know it.. -when baboons and pigeons are correct, they are confident, and their reaction time is faster. When they are incorrect, their response time jumps 300-400ms, showing hesitation. This cognitive insight shows that they really are aware of their memories. -suggests that the fundamental mechanisms of memory between baboons and pigeons may actually be very similar despite the differences in their species Serial Position Effect: objects are remembered in a U-Shaped curve related to both recency and primacy, primacy takes over as tasks get harder Long-term Memory of individual neighbours in a migratory songbird -males in this population return for migration each April with established boundaries with neighbouring males. These birds can map out the territory of different neighbours. -in the first part of each breading season, each male sang a distinctive pattern repeatedly, -males would sing aggressively if a new male came into their territory, but not as aggressively if the bird was an established neighbour that was coming in – these birds were played recordings of old neighbour songs and remembered their neighbours from the year before, and when played a recording of a novel bird they chirped more agressively, sooner, and flew around to try to find the novel bird more frequently. Memory and Consciousness -Are animals aware of their memory? -first seal mothers and offspring recognize each other focalization when they return to the breeding grounds after a year or more away Memory is selective: Remembering without awareness.. -consider the distinction between implicit and explicit memory in humans. People are shown a few letters of a word and asked to fill in the blanks. The ability to recognize the word in the fill in the blank task from a previous list has no effect on completion. However, the ability to recall the words if asked to write them on a list drops significantly from one day to seven days as a retention interval. -fragment completion is an implicit memory, memory without awareness. Such as filling in assassin. Recognition/recall is an explicit memory, you need to think about it. -implicit memory and explicit memory are statistically independent Are monkeys aware of their memories? Show a sample image, allow for a retention interval. Then given a forced choice where a symbol represented they “know it”, and on 2/3 of the trials another distinct symbol was used to represent “no”. Saying you know it resulted in a memory test that could either end in a peanut or nothing, saying you don’t know resulted in monkey chow, which was not as good but it was still something. -When “know” is chosen, accuracy on the memory test should be higher than on the forced memory test. -When memory is good, “know” should be chosen more often -Animals should immediately pass on novel test If monkeys are aware of their memories, they should do better on memory tests when they choose to take it. They should pass a novel test (a trial with no sample). They should decline the memory test more often when memory is worse. -they do 10-15% better when they are selecting they know and when they are not given the chance to opt out. -to ensure monkeys are actually paying attention, they showed them a stimuli they never showed before, they typically opt out of the trial -monkeys declined memory tests more often with a greater retention interval, expected Monkeys are responding to some private cue that predicts success of memory. Example of a metacognitive judgment of memory, can be used to improve selection of behaviour. Not necessarily meant to be a reflective process. We can never say for sure if the subjective experience of that memory is the same as humans. Rhesus Monkeys -monkeys chose among four opaque tubes, one of which concealed food. The tube containing the reward varied randomly from trial to trial. On half the trials the monkeys observed the experimenter baiting the tube, whereas on the remaining trials their view of the baiting was obstrcuted. -on each trial monkeys were allowed a single chance to select the tube containing the reward. Monkeys were allowed to look into the tubes – the proportion of looks increased significantly if they did not see the experimenter bait the tube with food. Other tests of metacognition.. -is the pixel density different between the left side and the right side? If you cannot tell, you are allowed to say that you are uncertain. -people and monkeys are extremely similar, easily identifying the differences when the density ratio is large, however uncertainty raises as the images become more similar. The monkeys and humans show that behaviour is consistent with metacognition that humans display. -monkeys were able to choose to participate in a task for stimulus recognition and if they were correct would receive a peanut, if wrong nothing, if opted out monkey chow – the longer the retention interval, the worse they did on forced tests, the more they escaped, and the more matching accuracy on chosen tests exceeded that on forced tests. -these findings suggest that monkeys are responding to some private cue that predicts success on the test of memory and in that sense they are aware of the strength of their memories Memory – Learning vs. Knowing Do animals have episodic memory? – memory from what, where, and when in the past -accompanied by autonoetic consciousness ( a feeling of reexperiencing the remembered event) Western Scrub Jay: their caches consist of perishable and non-perishable items, and may be pilfered by other scrub jays. When other jays can hear them but cannot see them, they cache quietly and in quiet areas. When they are on their own, they may cache in the noisier gravel condition. They will even seek out caches depending on what the cache actually contains – if it is a perishable item they tend to seek it out earlier. Test of Episodic Memory: -2 trials: burying nuts, wait 120 hours, bury worms, wait 4 hours, recover food : bury the worms, wait 120 hours, bury the nut, wait 4 hours, recover food -the difference is that the worm is now decayed, and the scrub jay shows general knowledge about the rate that food had perished by showing a significantly less preference for going for the worms -if their first trial was with the decayed worms, they definitely go for it less the next time around even more so in the group. This key knowledge of the past affects their future decisions. Rats allowed into five arms in first part of trial: one has chocolate, three have rat food. After a retention interval of one hour there was no chocolate. After a retention interval of 25 hours, the chocolate was put back. After the short interval, rats had learned that there was not enough time for there to be new chocolate, but at the long trial…… Stage Two: during a 25hour RI, after a single presentation of LiCL to make them sick, upon their next trial they refuse to go down that arm whatsoever, further supporting episodic memory and them adjusting their behaviour accordingly. Summary -scrub jays and rats have flexible memory for what, where, and when – episodic like memory found.
