Greg Detre
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
the data
showing that dogs can and chimps can�t do the object choice task might not be
statistically significant
chimps just
might not be used to people altruistically pointing out monopolisable pieces of
food to them
don�t ever
directly compare puppies and adult wolves
once people
learn such a skill, they never get it wrong � what does it mean to get it right
quite a lot?
Coppinger
is a major critic of their experiment, and thinks that you can�t turn a wolf
into a dog � he thinks dogs domesticated themselves
Bruce: they
might simply be less fearful of people, and be more willing to pay attention to
them
moreover, they have learned that paying attention to people brings good
things, especially food being brought to them (which is kind of a similar
gesture to pointing)
and these might all be functions of domestications, but that�s a
different thing from saying that they�re actually paying attention to the
full-fledged social cues
thinks that we could build a robot to do those things now, but without
attempting any of the less conservative social cognition claims made in the
title + conclusions
visual cues aren�t as significant to dogs, because their vision isn�t
too good
there might be the smell of food on the person�s hand