To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report on "Animal Intelligence" by Marcia Clemmitt, October 22, 2010.
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Just a few decades ago, the jury was still out on animal intelligence. But agreement now is virtually universal among scientists that animals of all kinds perform remarkable feats of mind — including actual reasoning. However, while some argue that several species perform very high-level cognitive activities including “metacognition” — loosely defined as “thinking about thinking” — others contend that studies of such complex thought are prone to experimental designs that tempt researchers to overinterpret.
“Abstract concepts are extremely widespread in the animal kingdom, all the way down to bees,” says Peter Carruthers, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Studies in which bees navigate a maze demonstrate that the insects grasp the concepts “same” and “different” because they can learn and follow a navigational plan that requires them to turn right, for example, when they spot a design that's the same as one they previously saw but turn left when the picture is different, he explains.
Just How Smart Are They?
Furthermore, “Bees have a cognitive map and can find their way home even if they've never flown that way before,” Carruthers says.
Some animals, such as monkeys, show a fairly sophisticated ability to form “representations” of things in their minds, rather than being able to reason only about real-life objects that they can see in front of them at the present time, says Herbert S. Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University in New York City.
For example, a monkey can memorize an arbitrary sequence of photographs, and then, when later shown only two pictures from the sequence, arrange them in the order of the original sequence, even though the picture sequence isn't in view, Terrace says. To do this, the animals must consult mental “representations” of what they've seen — evidence of an ability to “think without language,” Terrace says.
Recently, wild crows in a New Zealand laboratory experiment showed an especially remarkable cognitive feat — “insight” — the ability to devise a correct solution to a novel problem without doing any trial-and-error manipulation in the real world, says Carruthers. Confronted with a situation that required the birds to use one stick to retrieve a second longer stick, which they could then use to retrieve a food reward, one bird “looked at the setup for about a minute, and then accomplished it on the first try,” he says. [Footnote 12]
“What would a human do to arrive at the answer? Go through possibilities” mentally, waiting for an “insight.” It's hard to escape the conclusion that the crow did something similar, Carruthers says.
Recently many studies have examined whether some animals show forms of “higher” thinking traditionally considered the sole province of humans, such as a “theory of mind” — awareness that other animals or humans have thoughts going on inside them, just as one does oneself — and metacognition. Unlike humans, animals can't tell us what's going on in their minds, so to examine metacognition researchers set up experiments that give animals a way to demonstrate through their behavior that they recognize that they're in a certain mental state — such as being uncertain about which of two test answers is correct.
In a typical experiment, an animal is offered a test with two possible answers — such as that one musical tone is higher or lower than another — and has correct choices reinforced with a substantial food reward. Once the animal knows what constitutes a correct answer, the task is made harder — the tones get closer together, for example. At this point, the animal gets a third response option — usually the choice to opt out of choosing either of the other answers — for which there is a guaranteed, but relatively small reward.
Opting for this less rewarding “uncertainty” response demonstrates that the animal recognizes its own mental state — i.e., that it's uncertain which of the two other choices will yield the big reward that's reserved for getting the right answer, says J. David Smith, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. When macaque monkeys and humans take the same test, they choose the “I'm uncertain” response at the same rate. That's evidence, he says, that, like the human test subjects, the monkeys recognize their own mental feeling of uncertainty — a mark of “metacognition.”
In a similar experiment by Columbia's Terrace, a monkey was presented with two “confidence icons” just after the animal had given its answer on a perception-based test similar to the musical tones test. “One icon signified high confidence; the other, low confidence” in the answer the monkey has just given, Terrace explains. [Footnote 13]
“Choosing the high-confidence icon was a ‘risky’ bet.” If the monkey chose that icon after it had given the right answer on the test, it won three tokens, but if the monkey chose the “high confidence” response after a wrong answer, it lost three tokens, “and they really don't like that,” Terrace says. Choosing the “low-confidence” icon always got a reward of one token.
Monkeys chose the high-confidence icon more often after they had given correct answers and the low-confidence icon more often after they had given incorrect answers, the exact same response one gets from humans — who can not only feel a mental state like “uncertainty” at the moment we experience it but can also remember the feeling. The experiment shows that a monkey “can monitor its accuracy on perceptual tasks and transfer that ability to monitoring its memory” — i.e., it can consult an after-the-fact “mental representation” of the feeling of uncertainty it previously experienced. This activity indicates some level of metacognition — an ability to think about mental states — wrote Terrace and his fellow researchers. [Footnote 14]
But other scholars say that so far no experiments show that animals can use abstract concepts to reason about their own minds, or about anything else except concrete objects, a clear limitation to their thinking.
“To some extent, this is a verbal confusion,” says Carruthers. Experiments do show that some animal species — just like humans — are aware of their feelings of uncertainty, but that awareness alone doesn't meet the standard definition of “metacognition,” as it's used in human psychology. True metacognition requires actual “thinking about thinking” — reasoning based on one's awareness of the state — and that hasn't been proven, Carruthers argues.
Evidence has shown that many animals form abstract concepts based on sensory perceptions, but no evidence actually shows that they can form concepts about things that they cannot see or touch, like mental states, says Daniel J. Povinelli, a professor of biology at the University of Louisiana, at Lafayette.
“The question is whether the experiments as designed have the power to” produce these more far-reaching conclusions — such as that “monkeys and parrots are interpreting their own mental states” or “that crows think about the principles of physics.” While it's possible the animals do these things, “there is simply no evidence that they do,” Povinelli says.
For example, after observing many individual instances of fellow chimpanzees pursing their lips and bristling their fur just before hitting or charging them, chimps certainly form a catch-all concept — like “threat display; better look out!” — to reference such occasions. [Footnote 15] There is no evidence, however, that a chimp goes beyond this concrete representation to form a concept about some state existing within the pursing, bristling chimp that motivates the behavior — as a human would do by positing “anger” or “aggressiveness,” for example, says Povinelli.
From experience with lifting things, both a chimp and a human can develop the concept of “heavy” and sort objects by whether they're “heavy” or “light,” for example, he says. But humans routinely take abstraction much farther, generalizing beyond concrete objects to things we can't see or touch, for example, by applying the concept of “heavy” even to nonphysical things like sadness, as when we have a “heavy heart,” and by immediately realizing that an object from the “heavy” pile is the one to choose, if the goal is to knock another object over, he says.
“We haven't seen any evidence” that chimps or other animals can handle these levels of abstraction, Povinelli says.
The Issues:
* Do animals think?
* Do animals use language?
* Are animal and human minds more similar than once thought?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Animal Intelligence" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
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Footnotes
[12] For background, see Alex H. Taylor, Douglas Elliffe, Gavin R. Hunt and Russell D. Gray, “Complex Cognition and Behavioral Innovation in New Caledonian Crows,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, April 21, 2010.
[13] Nate Kornell, Lis K. Son and Herbert S. Terrace, “Transfer of Metacognitive Skills and Hint Seeking in Monkeys,” Psychological Science, January 2007, p. 64, .
[14] Ibid.
[15] For background, see Daniel J. Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk, “Chimpanzee Minds: Suspiciously Human?” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, April 2003, p. 157,.
Do animals think?
“Animal Cruelty” Law Struck Down
By Kenneth Jost
The Supreme Court has thrown out on free speech grounds a 10-year old federal animal cruelty statute aimed at outlawing so-called crush videos - graphic depictions of intentional killing of small animals marketed to people who find the videos sexually arousing.
In a forceful opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led an 8-1 majority in concluding that the 1999 law risked criminalizing too much constitutionally protected speech to survive First Amendment scrutiny. Roberts described the law as creating “a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth” and discounted the government’s assurances in briefs and oral argument to apply it narrowly.
Roberts left open the possibility of a narrower law aimed solely at crush videos, dog fighting or “other depictions of extreme animal cruelty.” In a lone dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that the law could have been upheld under a narrow construction. He warned that the decision would result in renewed production of crush videos, which had largely disappeared since the law was passed.
The law, codified as 18 U.S.C. § 48, prohibited any “depiction of animal cruelty,” broadly defined to include still photographs or audio or video recording of “conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed.” The prohibition applied if the conduct was illegal under federal law or the law of the state where the conduct took place or the material was found. It included exceptions for material with “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.”
The ruling threw out the conviction and 37-month prison sentence handed down to a Virginia man, Robert Stevens, in 2005 for selling to federal undercover agents two videos depicting organized dog fights in the United States and a third showing a wild boar hunt. Stevens, the first person convicted under the law after a trial, had operated a business called “Dogs of Velvet and Steel” and maintained a Web site devoted to the pit bull breed of dogs.
Congress passed the law after hearing testimony from animal protection groups and others about the extensive market in crush videos and the difficulty of prosecuting people involved in their production. Roberts quoted a House committee report on the bill describing the videos as typically featuring women using their feet or high-heel shoes to slowly crush to death “helpless animals,” including dogs, cats, mice, monkeys and hamsters. The videos “appeal to persons with a very specific sexual fetish,” the House committee report said.
The justices agreed to hear the government’s appeal after the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reversed Stevens’ convictions in October 2006. The appeals court divided 2-1 in holding that the law failed the so-called “strict scrutiny” test because it did not advance a compelling government interest nor was it narrowly tailored for that purpose. The high court heard arguments at the start of its current term in October 2009 and kept the case under advisement for an unusually long time, six-and-a-half months.
In a 20-page opinion, Roberts rejected the government’s call to define depictions of animal cruelty as categorically outside the First Amendment and then applied a well recognized “overbreadth doctrine” to find the law unconstitutional. The law could even apply to hunting magazines, Roberts said, because the District of Columbia’s ban on hunting would criminalize any publications possessed within its borders.
During arguments, deputy U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal repeatedly said the law did not apply to depictions of hunting. But Roberts said hunting magazines and possibly other legitimate depictions of killing or wounding of animals could not be saved by what he described as the government’s “unrealistically broad reading” of the act’s exceptions clause. And he dismissed the government’s promise to apply the statute only in cases of “extreme” cruelty. “We would not uphold an unconstitutional statute,” the chief justice wrote, “merely because the Government promised to use it responsibly.”
In his dissent, Alito said the court should have sent the case back for a specific ruling on whether the three videos cited against Stevens were constitutionally protected. “I do not think the present record supports the Court’s conclusion that §48 bans a substantial quantity of protected speech,” he wrote.
The Humane Society of America voiced “disappointment” with the ruling but urged Congress to move “swiftly” to pass a narrower law. “The Supreme Court's decision gives us a clear pathway to enact a narrower ban on the sale of videos depicting malicious acts of cruelty, including animal crush videos and dogfighting,” said Wayne Pacelle, the society’s president and CEO.
Stevens’ effort to overturn the law attracted support from an unusual coalition of First Amendment advocates, media organizations and hunting groups, including the National Rifle Association. In a statement, the Professional Outdoor Media Association applauded the ruling. “The First Amendment rights of traditional outdoor sports journalists, those who cover legal hunting and fishing and promote the enjoyment of these American heritage sports, are protected,” the group said.
For more on animal-protection policies, see Marcia Clemmitt, “Animal Rights,” CQ Researcher, Jan. 8, 2010.
Do animals have rights?
To follow is an excerpt from this week's CQ Researcher on "Animal Rights" by Marcia Clemmitt, January 8, 2010
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Humans have used animals throughout history for food, sport, tasks like hauling and plowing and scientific 
experimentation, and most people have been comfortable with using animals, even when they suffer and die in the process. Nevertheless, a persistent minority has long questioned whether animals may have a right to be treated with concern for their comfort and welfare.
“To my mind, we shouldn't be thinking of monkeys as commodities, disposable resources” that can be the object of distressing experimentation, for example, says Mark Bernstein, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “Just by virtue of their sentience, their capacity to suffer, they should have the minimal right to not suffer,” he says. “We don't treat compromised human beings” — such as people with severe cognitive disabilities — “that way.”
Chickens, for example, “clearly have interests, preferences and desires and are able to act to satisfy their interests and preferences,” a fact that should give them at least some “right” to moral consideration by humans, with whom they share those traits, said Gary L. Francione, a professor of law at the Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, N.J. “When we kill these non-humans, we frustrate their ability to enjoy the satisfaction of their interests, preferences and desires — just as we do when we kill humans.” [Footnote 14]
“Although it is noble” for a human “to undergo a painful bone marrow transplant to save the life of a stranger, we think it would be wrong to require them to undergo that procedure,” but we require animals to suffer intensely for human benefit all the time, wrote Hugh LaFollette, an ethics professor at the University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg, and Niall Shanks, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at Wichita State University, in Kansas. “Each year in the United States nearly 70 million mammals … are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice” in laboratories “to benefit … humans…. “This clashes with the moral presumption against inflicting suffering on one creature … to benefit some other creature.” [Footnote 15]
“If it would be absurd to give animals the right to vote, it would be no less absurd to give that right to infants or to severely retarded human beings. Yet we still give equal consideration to their interests,” said Princeton University philosophy professor Peter Singer, author of the 1975 book, Animal Liberation, which inspired much of the modern animal-advocacy movement. “We don't raise them for food in overcrowded sheds or test household cleaners on them…. But we do these things to non-human animals who show greater abilities in reasoning than these humans … because we have a prejudice in favor of the view that all humans are somehow infinitely more valuable than any animal.” [Footnote 16]
Critics of animal-protection activists overinterpret the word “rights,” as it's used by most animal-welfare advocates, some analysts argue.
The idea of a rights-based philosophy of animal protection is that “in virtue of some of the properties animals have” — notably “sentience,” the ability to be aware of feelings, such as pain — “animals deserve some minimal rights,” says Bernstein. To some critics the phrase “animal rights” calls up visions of “giving pigs driver's licenses,” but “that's not the idea. It's that animals, by virtue of their ability to feel, are not things to be tortured.”
“You're not talking about rights in the philosophical sense” of a civil right related to citizenship, for example, says Kenneth Shapiro, executive director of the Animals and Society Institute, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based think tank on animal issues. What “animal rights” means to most animal-protection advocates is that “animals have interests, and we don't want to screw them. Most of the people in the established movement don't consider themselves ‘rightists’ in that sense. They're trying to make things better.”
But some analysts from the biomedical-research community and the agriculture industry say that not just some but most animal-protection advocates actually do favor granting animals rights so broad that, if granted, those rights would effectively end all human use of animals.
The Humane Society of the United States has an “extremist” agenda with regard to animal rights, although the public who support the group with donations generally don't realize this, says Trull at the Foundation for Biomedical Research. “On their Web site they say they ultimately want to eliminate all use of animals in research,” an extreme animal-rights position, Trull says.
“The possession of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by the vast majority of living things,” said University of Michigan professor of philosophy Carl Cohen. “We must not infer … that a live being has, simply in being alive, a ‘right’ to its life. The assertion that all animals, only because they are alive and have interests, also possess the ‘right to life’ is an abuse of that phrase, and wholly without warrant.” [Footnote 17]
Most people intuitively understand that animals cannot have “rights” in anything like the way humans do, said Jan Narveson, a professor of philosophy at Canada's University of Waterloo. For example, “most people think that if we could find a cure for cancer by performing on thousands of monkeys in ways that are extremely painful and later fatal to the monkeys, we should still go right ahead,” Narveson said. “Most people think animal experimentation permissible, so long as it could lead to something important for us,” and “when philosophers … deny this … they go against normal intuitions…. We rightly outlaw slavery.” However, “since we don't think animals are people, we don't think of our use of them as ‘enslavement,’ a category only applicable to beings like ourselves.” [Footnote 18]
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Animal Rights" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Footnotes:
[14] Gary L. Francione, “Peter Singer and the Welfarist Position on the Lesser Value of Nonhuman Life,” Animal Rights: Abolitionist Approach blog, March 22, 2009.
[15] Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, “Utilizing Animals,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, January 1995, p. 13.
[16] Peter Singer and Richard A. Posner, “Animal Rights,” Slate, June 15, 2009.
[17] Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” The New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 2, 1986, pp. 865–869.
[18] Jan Narveson, Moral Matters (1999), p. 135.
