Week 8
There are a few topics this week: intelligence, tool using and mental imagery. Chapter 35 first discussed a little bit about individual differences in animal intelligence, such as one pigeon being able to solve problems within a fraction of the time that other pigeons could, and that certain birds’ ability is correlated with their plumage…
Week 7
The topic this week is sequential behaviors and ordinal knowledge. Notably, this is quite relevant to some of the topics we discussed before, particularly timing and counting. The serial learning paradigms reviewed in chapter 31 and 32, which presented sequential patterns to rats, seemed to be a paradigm developed based on the earlier paradigms that…
Week 6
The topic of this week is concepts. It has been interesting for me to think about if/how this might be related to the topics from the past weeks, including spatial, temporal and numerical cognition, and even memory. We often think of concepts organized as a big network, such as a knowledge graph (which apparently happens…
Week 5
The topic of this week is time and counting. Chapter 22 reviewed the history of research on timing, where researchers tried to explain timing behaviors though various perspectives. The first few studies, just like many studies from every other topic we have discussed so far, used learning paradigms. (Learning paradigms seem so powerful that they…
Week 4
The topic of this week is spatial navigation in various animals, including rats, a few types of arthropods, and corvids. First of all, I like the perspective (in Leising & Blaisdell, 2009) that you could actually view spatial navigation as a series of reinforcement learning (a “stimulus-response chain”). I have never really thought about animal…
Week 3
This week the articles are related to memory processes. Chapter 13 made a good point in the beginning that human memory studies are often confounded by the previous experiences of participants, such as the memory strategies they learned and mnemonics, which vary from one individual to another. This has also been somewhat of a problem…
Week 2
The readings of this week concern associative learning and casual learning. This topic is interesting! Chapter 10 first started with discussing what properties between events makes us perceive causality in them. This includes spatial and temporal contiguity, temporal order, and contingency. Contingency seemed to be studied and modeled extensively. First, a (somewhat simplistic) rule-based approach…
Week 1
Donald Blough’s chapter talked about a series of experiments that measured pigeons’ reaction times to gain insights into their visual perception, attention and decision-making. He also contrasted some parts of the results to human research and it yielded interesting insights. He started with a few experiments on visual perception and visual search. In the first…
This Blog
I like exploring very different things and finding commonalities among them. This blog will be about comparative cognition, which normally compare across animals and humans, but because of my own background and interests I will occasionally add robots (artificial intelligence) to this comparison too. Robots and pigeons are both cool.
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Animals, Robots and Us 