Greg Detre
February 05, 2003
mind-reading
- v practical
sally-anne
test of false belief - baron-cohen, leslie, frith 1985
�� precursors of FB competence now being seen
at 2-3 years
�� chimp cognitive achievement of about 2-3
yrs
clues to
mindreading competence in chimps
�� careful adjustment based on the other's
reactions
�� novel retaliatory actions
(contra-deception)
examples
�� grooming the other chimp to divert
attention from food
reading
attention in infants - critical precursor in second year
��� joint attention
�� social referencing
�� social scaffolding
�� early lang acquisition
�� theory of mind
gaze
�� mutual gaze
�� deictic gaze� (butterworth 1991)
�� imperative pointing - chimps can do this
really well
�� declarative pointing
with the
chimps grooming seemingly as a distraction, it could just be that they groom
each other when they're nervous
seeing vs
knowing - povinelli and preuss 1995 - chimps can lean to ignore the advice of a
trainer who had a bucket over their head when the food was being hidden, but
they start off random, and they might just be being trained to ignore people
with buckets on their head, rather than realising that the person can't see
chimp seems
to look around the other side of a dividing wall to see what a human is looking
at (povinelli and eddy)
great apes
theory of mind more when human-raised - after 2 years, the apes start to try to
manipulate and communicate with the human and look at the door to go out
we might
gesture to make it easier for ourselves to think, and perhaps the
interpretation of those gestures came after
co-occurrence
based learning, associating word with object being attended to
words that
are spoken regardless of object presence are ignored
visual vs
auditory attention?
does the
child need to know that communication is being attempted?
if you ask
two year olds where the fendle is, when faced with an apple and a whisk, they
go for the whisk, perhaps because they don't want to associate two words with
the� same object
design
stance - how it looks??? no, it's the fact that it has been designed with a
purpose in mind
if you want
to make predictions about what will happen if you step outside its designed
purpose, you have to switch to the physical stance
intentional
- hidden beliefs + goals - aboutness
rationality
is the mother of intention - dennett, 1971
given that
we assume that other agents are rational, in the sense of trying to achieve
goals, we can use the intentional stance - perhaps better, consistent, like wiley coyote, or someone who doesn't
learn from their mistakes
the
sunflower, the ant and other people's beliefs
does the
sunflower have the goal of tracking the sun? don't you have to be able to
change your goals in the face of super-goals?
you
probably don't want to say that a rock pulled by a string has a goal to follow
the string...
the super
sunflower still follows the sun even when it's occluded
this is one
step further towards internalising the sun
an ant
viewed as a behaving system is quite simple. the apparent complexity of its
behaviour over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the
environment in which it finds itself - herbert simon, 1969
�� esp. the ant avoiding obstacles on a sandy
beach
outsourcing
- decisions, representation, memory
writing
shifts the boundaries of where the representation and intelligence lies
extra layer
of book-keeping - bloom - not only co-occurrence, but also modulated by gaze
and other intentional factors - recursive functionality, registering what you
register
scaffolding
+ hacks
getting a
dog to learn to roll over in less than twenty repretitions is pretty impressive
compared to machine learning
what do
chicks do when they come out of their shell - they peep, but they also peck
hunger has
nothing to do with pecking for the first forty-eight hours of a chick's life -
chicks in a sand box without food peck less
the main
reason to peck to start with is the pecking drive + novel stimuli - independent
of hungry or not
day 2 or 3
they start to develop taste - you feed them a mealworm, then another, they
gobble it down - it's not for nutritional value, because their gut won't have
had time to tell if its nutritional
chicks have
7 taste buds, and only start to connect pecking and reducing hunger by about
day 4
psychologists
+ ethologists are fortran guys, so they start with day 1 :)
the first
couple of days they're living off the yolk and don't need to eat - so this
process is giving them a chance to explore over the first couple of days when
it's not essential for them to do it well to survive
pecking
followed by ingestion is necessary for them to associate pecking and the
reduction of hunger
if they
swallow without pecking, they don't learn that pecking reduces hunger
if they
peck without ingesting, they don't learn it either
but if they
do learn it, then as hunger goes up, pecking goes up
is there
adaptive value of not connecting pecking to hunger reduction innately?
pecking is
a core motor function for many things
whether
chicks come out early or late, they still have a few days of experience to
learn it
the
predatory instinct in most animals, e.g. cats pouncing and chasing, has nothing
to do with food, and doesn't go up with hunger - in fact, kittens have to eat a
torn up mouse before they recognise that mice are food
how can you
build up these complicated sequences?
it makes
sense to do it this way, because by the time you've perfected pouncing just
because you enjoy it, you can then employ it once you've realised that mice
taste good
what is
curious?
�� ask questions
�� desire to know
�� seeking info
�� seeking stimulation
�� methodology
�� proactive
why be
curious?
�� more likely to put yourself in a situation
where you can learn
�� situating yourself in your environment -
initial discovery
�� filling up jigsaw of knowledge
do you need
language to be curious?
can an
animal be curious? can a machine?
when to be
curious?
�� you don't want to be curious when it
doesn't pay to be curious
do the
martians who are so smart they can work at the physical stance at all times cos
they don't need to simply up to the higher levels need to be curious?
�� this is confusing the issue
the infant
in the middle of a party staring at a nail in the while might be practising
stereopsis...
do we need
curiosity for survival?
�� well, not so much in a stable environment
why do
chicks peck???
�� to find out how tall they are - is this a
stupid answer???