By induction: it’s obvious that you can teach most dogs to press a button for “Food”, “Outside”, “Pets”, “Play”, and they won’t need to rely on clever hansian subtle cues from you to express desire for food, they’re already doing it just with a different modality.
For more abstract concepts like mad, happy or concerned or the ever-popular “love you”, you’re supposed to model those buttons when the dog is feeling these things, so you need to understand your pet very well, and it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand when you don’t.
So the danger is over-interpreting their output. Was this sentence intended or just random babbling? Does the dog understand the word differently from what it means in English? E.g. “bye” seems to become a verb meaning “leaving”, “love you” is used for affection but obviously doesn’t reflect deep understanding of the human concept of love. And every pet is going to develop its own idiolect with the owner, further complicating things. Alexis seems to be very aware of those issues and UCSD study claims (or hopes?) to have hundreds of participants, the large scale should help separate signal from noise.
There’s also some conflict of interest with Leo Trottier who has sites selling the buttons, pet games and learning material while being part of the research team.
There are some real concerns, but I still think there’s something real here.
So the danger is over-interpreting their output. Was this sentence intended or just random babbling? Does the dog understand the word differently from what it means in English? E.g. “bye” seems to become a verb meaning “leaving”, “love you” is used for affection but obviously doesn’t reflect deep understanding of the human concept of love.
Interestingly, there’s an argument that human infants also learn language by their parents over-interpreting their input, with the infants then adopting those interpretations as true. So one could argue that even if over-interpretation happens with dogs, that only makes it a process similar to human language learning, with the parent/child and owner/dog creating a shared language game.
Our first type of example comes from our own data concerning Zulu infants of between three and four months of age interacting with their mothers, and suggests an answer to this question. [...]
As noted above, there are times when a caregiver will want an infant to fall silent, or in isiZulu to ‘thula’. Zulu children are traditionally expected to be less socially active than contemporary Western children, to initiate fewer interactions, and, crucially, to show a respectful attitude towards adults. An early manifestation of this is in behaviours where a mother attempts to make an infant keep quiet, sometimes saying ‘thula’ (‘quiet’), ‘njega’ (‘no’), while simultaneously gesturing, moving towards or away from the infant, and reacting to details of the infants own behaviour (see Cowley et al., in press).
At these times the mother regularly leans forward, so that more of the infants visual field is taken up by her face and palms. New vocalisations, and movements or re-orientations of gaze by the infant, are often ‘nipped in the bud’ by dominating vocalisations (sometimes showing prosodic properties indicative of disapproval, comforting, attention and/or arousal towards the mother herself) from the mother, sometimes accompanied by increasingly emphatic hand-waving, and even closer crowding of the infants visual field. [...]
With high regularity, and within relatively little time, the particular infant often does ‘thula’, at which point it is generally rewarded with smiling, gentle touching, and other comforting.
At this stage there is no reason to believe that the infant knows what ‘thula’ or ‘njega’ means, or even that it could reliably re-identify the words, let alone produce or contemplate them, so it is extremely unlikely that the word-based aspects of maternal utterance-activity provide labels for the infant. We are considering infants before the stage linguists call ‘babbling’, let alone recognisable speech production. It is not even necessary to suppose that it ‘knows’ that it is supposed to be quiet when behaved at in the ways we have just described. We know that the mother wants the child to be quiet, that this expresses itself in behaviour by the mother, and that the infant comes to be quiet.
If we examine the mothers behaviour, though, we can make sense of it. She ensures that it is difficult for the infant to attend to anything else by crowding its visual field. She rejects active or new behaviours on its part by cutting off its vocalisations and movements with dominating signals of her own. She largely restricts approval signals, including relaxing the crowding, and reducing the magnitude of her gesturing, as well as expressing comfort through vocalisation, facial signalling and touch, to moments when the infant begins to quieten down. Its not particularly surprising, then, that it does quieten down.
The mothers behaviour includes salient, repeated, features which are apt for learning. Her patterns of hand gesturing, for example, could at the outset be iconic of the whole episode including her behaviour and the infants becoming quiet, but, when repetition allows the gesture to be individuated and recognised in its own right, go on to become an indexical cue that quietness should follow. The infants responses then become indexical for the mother of the degree to which the child is co-operative, well-behaved, or, more plainly, ‘good’. Caregiver descriptions of infant behaviour at these times, manifest either in their explicit vocalisations to the child, including references to being ‘good’, or references to possible disciplinary sanctions such as ‘kuza baba manje’ (‘wheres your father now?‘) or, in interviews following the videotaping, show that infant behaviour even at this early age is being classified in line with culturally specific expectations of good and bad behaviour. And a crucial part of what makes for a ‘good’ child is responding in ways sensitive to what caregiver behaviour is actually about, strikingly in controlling episodes such as the one just described, which make possible the earliest ascriptions of ‘obedience’, ‘cooperativeness’ and so forth.
These ascriptions are over-interpretations. They are, though, necessary overinterpretations, in so far as they motivate caregivers to imbue their own behaviour with regularities manifest regularities in their own behaviour which are then available as structure in the interactional environment for (learning by) the infant. A further episode from our data, in this case concerning a child of around four months, illustrates this point about over-interpretation. In it an infant repeatedly vocalises in ways which to its mother, at least, are suggestive of its saying ‘up’. Each time she says ‘up’?, or ‘you want to go up’? and after a few repetitions she lifts the child. Prior to the lifting, there is little evidence that the child actually wants to be lifted, or that it has its attention focussed on anything in particular, except perhaps its own experiments in vocal control. When it is lifted, though, it beams widely. Whatever it did want, if anything, it is now, we suggest, one step closer to figuring out how to behave in ways that lead to its being lifted up.
Still on the subject of lifting, consider the common gesture made around the eighth month by infants who want to be picked up (that is, who subsequently smile or otherwise show approval when they are picked up following such a gesture): a simultaneous raising, or flapping, of both arms (see Lock, 1991). This gesture is not simply copied from common adult behaviours. In the terms we are using here it is partly iconic, in virtue of being a common posture of infants while they are in fact being held up, and partly indexical, in virtue of being able to stand on its own as an indicator of ‘being up’, as well as being symbolically interpretable as an invitation to lift, or a request to be lifted. Such gestures are, importantly, serviceable label candidates, in virtue of being amenable to disembedding from behaviour, and eventually coming under deliberate control. An infant need not want to be lifted the first few times it makes such a gesture, it has only to be able to notice that the gesture tends to be followed by liftings.
If and when such learning takes place, it does so in the affectively charged environment we have briefly described. We want to bring discussion of the current example to a close by suggesting a way in which these interactions should be regarded as a further example of how minds can be extended through action. Clark and Chalmers suggestion is that paradigmatically mental states and processes can be realised by structures and resources external to the brain. The world beyond the skull of any individual includes, of course, the skulls and brains of others. If active externalism motivates the recognition of a cognitive prosthesis such as a filofax as part of what realises a mind, then the embodied brain of another can also play that role. Here, then, is our suggestion: that at times interacting caregiver-infant dyads are neither one individual nor two, but somewhere in between. At the risk of sounding sensational and un-PC at the same time, infant brains can be temporarily colonised by caregivers so as to accelerate learning processes. [...]
The instances of indexical learning we describe also permit the beginning of a kind of ‘semiotic arms race’ between infants and caregivers. Once an infant has learned, for example, that the arms-up gesture can lead to being lifted, it is possible for ‘requests’ (that is, behaviours taken as requests by others, no matter how they are to the infant) to be lifted to be acted on, or to be refused. Prior to the construction and learning of the indexical relationship, this was impossible––a parent would lift a child when the parent wanted to, or thought it would serve some end. Once it has been learned, ‘requests’ can be differentially responded to, depending on their situation in patterns of interaction extending through time. Personal and cultural contingencies about infants and parents will codetermine what patterns are formed, and whether, for example, requested lifting is more likely after relatively quick acquiescence to silencing behaviour, or less likely in the period following failure to attend to objects or events in which a caregiver attempted to arouse interest.
I tend towards the ‘Clever Hans’ hypothesis on this one too. Human language skills are much more complex due to our neurology, as are our cognitive abilities. That doesn’t mean dogs aren’t communicating at some rudimentary level, as they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.
Of course one reason more of this type of research isn’t done in academia anymore is that no one wants to shell out tons of money to disprove a lot of ‘crazy’ hypothesis. Proving things tends to be seen as more productive, especially in the short term, although the long term implications of disproving multiple hypothesis is that it tends to point one in a better direction for particular areas of potential for truth.
At any level, money is always a polarizing factor in the consideration of ‘scientific validity’, whether it’s selling buttons to ‘Dog Parents’ or selling data processing clout to Corporations and their beneficiaries. Just making something more convenient to study though doesn’t necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.
In this case though, I think animal cognition is important to study. In a Cohumane sense, it can provide clarity on issues like the ethical use of animals for food sources, experimental subjects, and issues regarding the destruction of the natural environment and extinction of animal and plant life. Is animal suffering even a thing first of all (of course, but does that extend further to insects or plant life?) and if it is a thing, what kinds of considerations are there for our past and present treatment of these life forms as ‘resources’ akin to minerals we mine out of the ground ( or for that matter, for ‘human resources’ and our treatment as such?)
When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does? I think that’s very unlikely, in a lot of interactions you can see an exchange where the pet is supposed to make a decision—the owner doesn’t know the right answer! When Bunny presses “ouch stranger paw” to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to “influence” that, without even being aware of the splinter? Some interactions are owner asking a question with a defined right answer, but there’s clearly much more than that happening.
they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often. Maybe it’s normie bias cropping up :D But most people aren’t obsessively reflective. A lot of self-reflective smart people have trouble understanding what it’s like to be someone far outside that cluster because of failure of imagination: there really is barely any reflection and associations are this loose and there simply isn’t anything deeper, there’s no underlying epistemological mistake to “fix”. My point being, being reflective doesn’t preclude language ability as much as you think.
Let’s look at feral children again. Do you think they’re very reflective? Language may be a tool that is required for development of ability to be reflective, and if that is the case we will see examples of dogs starting to show a degree of reflectiveness. Arguably, we’ve seen that already with Bunny asking questions about what/why “dog”. And yes, it’s a clickbaity video, and your (and mine) immediate reaction would be “faake”, but I think all of this stuff is done in good faith, and not faked or “creatively edited”.
Just making something more convenient to study though doesn’t necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.
I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using “Clever Hans” irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.
I’ve updated in the direction of “I’ll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog” but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of
Subconscious cues from trainers—true Clever Hans effects (dogs are super clued in to us thanks to selection pressure, in ways we don’t naturally detect)
Experiment design that has obvious holes in it (at first)
Experiment design that has subtle holes in it (once the easy problems are dealt with)
Alternative explanations, of experimentally established hole-free results, from professional scientists (once the field becomes large enough to attract widespread academic attention). Like, yes, you unambiguously showed experimental result x, which you attributed to p, which would indeed explain x, but q is an equally plausible explanation which your experiment does not differentiate against.
This is based on a model of lay science that tends to show these patterns, because lay science tends to be a “labor of love” that makes it harder to detect one’s own biases.
Specifically on the volunteer-based projects, I expect additional issues with:
Selection effects in the experimentees (only unusually smart/perceptive/responsive/whatever dogs will make it past the first round of training; the others will have owners who get bored from lack of results and quit)
Selection effects in the experimenters (only certain types of people will even be aware of this research; only exceptionally talented dog trainers will stick with the program because training intelligent dogs takes so much f-ing patience, much less training dumber dogs)
There may be lines of research that conclusively establish some surprising things about dog intelligence, and I look forward to any such surprisal. But I’m going to wait until the dust settles more—and until there are more published papers because I have to work a lot harder to understand technical information conveyed by video—before engaging with the research.
While I haven’t done a rigorous study of the effect, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of suggestive and interesting phenomena eventually fall apart due to these exact reasons.
This is why I do not give much thought to this sort of stuff.
Ideally, I’d do a rigorous study of initially-interesting-but-later-fell-apart-studies or find someone else who has and then maybe I’d be better able to spend my cognitive resources...
When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does?
I’m thinking of it more as a variation on that idea. I think it’s possible that in the button case, the buttons could be stand ins for cues from an owner. Simply training with the buttons over time would modify a dogs behavior based solely on the presence or absence of the button. Work the toys in, and you’re simply training a dog to respond ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ in the presence or absence of a ‘thing’ associated with a particular sound and visual cue.
I think of lion tamers and other animals who have been trained to do tricks, like unicycling bears, and dolphins and orcas that are trained to jump through hoops when I see these types of things. Circuses things. It would be cool if dogs really could understand human language to the point where they could communicate back, but I just don’t believe it’s the case. Our brains developed complex areas devoted specifically to making and decoding speech, which depend on specific structures of our throats. These are all things all animals except for humans lack.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often.
I sometimes think modern life is just learning to inhibit our reflexive actions, which are based on our reflexive states. We do this inhibiting not only because of social training (like dog training or obedience school, what to do, not why to do it), but also because of our reflective ability (why or why not to do it), which allows us to (theoretically) do things like putting off getting rewards now for more rewards in the future, or to develop interpersonal relationship skills to try to work with people we reflexively dislike.
These are things dogs can’t do, as they involve ability to think abstractly about concepts like time and etiquette. Dogs can be trained to inhibit their reflexive behavior, and ‘act’ a particular way (don’t bite, don’t bark, come to me when I make particular sound or give a particular gesture, or press this button when they hear a particular sound) but not to reflect on why it’s important to do so.
If they can be taught to reflect like this, I have some doggy pipes and smoking jackets with a monocle and leather reading chair made specifically for dogs to be able to sit and read the paper (after they fetch it) to sell you. :)
By induction: it’s obvious that you can teach most dogs to press a button for “Food”, “Outside”, “Pets”, “Play”, and they won’t need to rely on clever hansian subtle cues from you to express desire for food, they’re already doing it just with a different modality.
For more abstract concepts like mad, happy or concerned or the ever-popular “love you”, you’re supposed to model those buttons when the dog is feeling these things, so you need to understand your pet very well, and it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand when you don’t.
So the danger is over-interpreting their output. Was this sentence intended or just random babbling? Does the dog understand the word differently from what it means in English? E.g. “bye” seems to become a verb meaning “leaving”, “love you” is used for affection but obviously doesn’t reflect deep understanding of the human concept of love. And every pet is going to develop its own idiolect with the owner, further complicating things. Alexis seems to be very aware of those issues and UCSD study claims (or hopes?) to have hundreds of participants, the large scale should help separate signal from noise.
There’s also some conflict of interest with Leo Trottier who has sites selling the buttons, pet games and learning material while being part of the research team.
There are some real concerns, but I still think there’s something real here.
Interestingly, there’s an argument that human infants also learn language by their parents over-interpreting their input, with the infants then adopting those interpretations as true. So one could argue that even if over-interpretation happens with dogs, that only makes it a process similar to human language learning, with the parent/child and owner/dog creating a shared language game.
I tend towards the ‘Clever Hans’ hypothesis on this one too. Human language skills are much more complex due to our neurology, as are our cognitive abilities. That doesn’t mean dogs aren’t communicating at some rudimentary level, as they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.
Of course one reason more of this type of research isn’t done in academia anymore is that no one wants to shell out tons of money to disprove a lot of ‘crazy’ hypothesis. Proving things tends to be seen as more productive, especially in the short term, although the long term implications of disproving multiple hypothesis is that it tends to point one in a better direction for particular areas of potential for truth.
At any level, money is always a polarizing factor in the consideration of ‘scientific validity’, whether it’s selling buttons to ‘Dog Parents’ or selling data processing clout to Corporations and their beneficiaries. Just making something more convenient to study though doesn’t necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.
In this case though, I think animal cognition is important to study. In a Cohumane sense, it can provide clarity on issues like the ethical use of animals for food sources, experimental subjects, and issues regarding the destruction of the natural environment and extinction of animal and plant life. Is animal suffering even a thing first of all (of course, but does that extend further to insects or plant life?) and if it is a thing, what kinds of considerations are there for our past and present treatment of these life forms as ‘resources’ akin to minerals we mine out of the ground ( or for that matter, for ‘human resources’ and our treatment as such?)
When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does? I think that’s very unlikely, in a lot of interactions you can see an exchange where the pet is supposed to make a decision—the owner doesn’t know the right answer! When Bunny presses “ouch stranger paw” to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to “influence” that, without even being aware of the splinter? Some interactions are owner asking a question with a defined right answer, but there’s clearly much more than that happening.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often. Maybe it’s normie bias cropping up :D But most people aren’t obsessively reflective. A lot of self-reflective smart people have trouble understanding what it’s like to be someone far outside that cluster because of failure of imagination: there really is barely any reflection and associations are this loose and there simply isn’t anything deeper, there’s no underlying epistemological mistake to “fix”. My point being, being reflective doesn’t preclude language ability as much as you think.
Let’s look at feral children again. Do you think they’re very reflective? Language may be a tool that is required for development of ability to be reflective, and if that is the case we will see examples of dogs starting to show a degree of reflectiveness. Arguably, we’ve seen that already with Bunny asking questions about what/why “dog”. And yes, it’s a clickbaity video, and your (and mine) immediate reaction would be “faake”, but I think all of this stuff is done in good faith, and not faked or “creatively edited”.
https://youtu.be/Fn8Fx0bqzT4 https://youtu.be/vLD7GIc8kZQ
Yeah this effect can be negative.
I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using “Clever Hans” irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.
I’ve updated in the direction of “I’ll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog” but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of
Subconscious cues from trainers—true Clever Hans effects (dogs are super clued in to us thanks to selection pressure, in ways we don’t naturally detect)
Experiment design that has obvious holes in it (at first)
Experiment design that has subtle holes in it (once the easy problems are dealt with)
Alternative explanations, of experimentally established hole-free results, from professional scientists (once the field becomes large enough to attract widespread academic attention). Like, yes, you unambiguously showed experimental result x, which you attributed to p, which would indeed explain x, but q is an equally plausible explanation which your experiment does not differentiate against.
This is based on a model of lay science that tends to show these patterns, because lay science tends to be a “labor of love” that makes it harder to detect one’s own biases.
Specifically on the volunteer-based projects, I expect additional issues with:
Selection effects in the experimentees (only unusually smart/perceptive/responsive/whatever dogs will make it past the first round of training; the others will have owners who get bored from lack of results and quit)
Selection effects in the experimenters (only certain types of people will even be aware of this research; only exceptionally talented dog trainers will stick with the program because training intelligent dogs takes so much f-ing patience, much less training dumber dogs)
There may be lines of research that conclusively establish some surprising things about dog intelligence, and I look forward to any such surprisal. But I’m going to wait until the dust settles more—and until there are more published papers because I have to work a lot harder to understand technical information conveyed by video—before engaging with the research.
While I haven’t done a rigorous study of the effect, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of suggestive and interesting phenomena eventually fall apart due to these exact reasons.
This is why I do not give much thought to this sort of stuff.
Ideally, I’d do a rigorous study of initially-interesting-but-later-fell-apart-studies or find someone else who has and then maybe I’d be better able to spend my cognitive resources...
I’m thinking of it more as a variation on that idea. I think it’s possible that in the button case, the buttons could be stand ins for cues from an owner. Simply training with the buttons over time would modify a dogs behavior based solely on the presence or absence of the button. Work the toys in, and you’re simply training a dog to respond ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ in the presence or absence of a ‘thing’ associated with a particular sound and visual cue.
I think of lion tamers and other animals who have been trained to do tricks, like unicycling bears, and dolphins and orcas that are trained to jump through hoops when I see these types of things. Circuses things. It would be cool if dogs really could understand human language to the point where they could communicate back, but I just don’t believe it’s the case. Our brains developed complex areas devoted specifically to making and decoding speech, which depend on specific structures of our throats. These are all things all animals except for humans lack.
I sometimes think modern life is just learning to inhibit our reflexive actions, which are based on our reflexive states. We do this inhibiting not only because of social training (like dog training or obedience school, what to do, not why to do it), but also because of our reflective ability (why or why not to do it), which allows us to (theoretically) do things like putting off getting rewards now for more rewards in the future, or to develop interpersonal relationship skills to try to work with people we reflexively dislike.
These are things dogs can’t do, as they involve ability to think abstractly about concepts like time and etiquette. Dogs can be trained to inhibit their reflexive behavior, and ‘act’ a particular way (don’t bite, don’t bark, come to me when I make particular sound or give a particular gesture, or press this button when they hear a particular sound) but not to reflect on why it’s important to do so.
If they can be taught to reflect like this, I have some doggy pipes and smoking jackets with a monocle and leather reading chair made specifically for dogs to be able to sit and read the paper (after they fetch it) to sell you. :)