Cognitive science and equine cognition

[Elizabeth Moon]

For those interested in the science behind various assertions on equine
cognition, "emotions", and the direction science is headed right now,
here are some current trends in cognitive science (with a few references,
but only a few since we throw journals out after about 18 months, due to
lack of space.)

Cognitive science is in a state of flux right now, with rapid advances
along many fronts...there is converging evidence, from both the
computational side (people trying to design artificial neural nets that
actually *do* something, and other approaches to artificial
intelligence), and the biological side (studies in brain function at the
cellular and subcellular level, in multiple species; field observation
of wild animals; better understanding of the minutiae of genetic
selection in evolution) that many previous theories of cognition were
wrong. The more recent ones are more right than the oldest, but they're
still wrong (and today's theories are also "wrong", in that they're
incomplete, but they're more right than, say, those of ten years ago.)

Several points are now generally agreed on. First, the "mind" (what we
experience as a nonphysical entity) is actually the brain's biochemical
and bioelectrical activity: consciousness and thought are physical
phenomena.

Second, the computational functions of the mammalian brain are modular: a
"family" of brain cells is dedicated to a particular narrowly defined
task, such as (in the visual system) the recognition of straight-line
edges, or angled edges. This modularity persists from the lowest level
processing to the highest, with integration between modules but not
exchanged function. The evidence is solid, both from studies of "what's
not there anymore" in brain-injured humans, and in PET-scan (positron
emission) scans in both brain-injured and normals (of humans and other
mammalian species.) In other kinds of critters (such as fish and squids
and birds), there appears to be modularity though (as you might expect)
the same parts of the brain don't do the same things as they do in
mammals.

Third, all the information acted on has been processed up several levels.
What you see is not what your eyes gather, so to speak, but what your
brain interprets of what your eyes look at. One of the things young
mammals have to do when they start seeing (whether they're born with
vision, like humans and horses, or start out blind like kittens) is
integrate their visual processing with other sensory information about
the world, so that they recognize things from all sides and in any
orientation. The separate modules to do so are already in the brain, but
have to be primed with experience. If the experience is not provided to
the developing young at the right age, the person (or animal) cannot then
use a perfectly good sensory organ for anything but exterior decoration.
(Smell is the most basic sense, with the least processing on the way up
to recognition, but smells are processed in the integration with other
senses.)

Fourth, these computational modules exist in all mammalian brains, though
each species has a slightly different "balance" (more visual processing,
or more auditory processing, or whatever has been optimized for its
particular ecological niche, selected for because of an advantage it
provides in a given setting.) Thus, although cat vision covers a
different range of possibilities than human vision, information about cat
vision *is* relevant to human vision (and vice versa), both
developmentally and (where the abilities overlap) functionally.

The evidence for the above assertions is solid, and has been published in
major reviewed science journals (such as _Nature_, _Science_,
_Cognition_, etc.) Some of these articles I've read personally (because
we've subscribed to _Nature_ and _Science_ for over 25 years now); others
I've become acquainted with through review articles or books (such as
Steven Pinker's _How the Mind Works_, a semi-popularization of existing
cognitive theory. That is, your average bright-enough person can read it
without choking on the terminology.) Pinker is controversial, but he is
working on the cutting edge--he's director of the Center for Cognitive
Neuroscience at MIT.

One consequence of this is that the distinction between human and animal
information processing at "low" levels (low being defined right here and
now as "what most of us would call more physical and less mental") has
blurred considerably. A dog racing to catch a Frisbee uses the same
"calculus" as an outfielder racing to catch a ball--the cognitive
processing of distance-over-direction-over-speed is the same, and
developed the same way (by running around chasing and jumping at moving
objects.) Similarly a horse cutting off a cow.

Now one of the problems in considering how equines process information is
that less research has been done on this than on, for example, cats,
squids, sharks, dogs, and primates of all kinds. The obvious reason is
that horses are large, messy, and expensive--not your idea lab animal.
(It'd be a real challenge to get a horse into a PET scanner to test which
part of its brain is active when it's performing some task.) And since
horses have an economic role to play, research on them has concentrated
on making them more useful. People who want to hang around horses
usually want to ride or drive them, not give them tests of information
processing, while people who *are* interested in how horses think usually
lack the training to devise meaningful experiments. With this great
blank space of ignorance about how horses actually do this or that,
there's ample room for unsupported opinions on all sides...and even the
best observation leaves a lot of questions. For instance, primates
recognize moving images of others of their species, and can "learn"
behavior from a video image (lab-raised monkeys with no initial fear of a
snakelike shape showed fear after being shown a videotape of same-species
monkeys reacting in fear.) Cats and dogs appear to recognize moving
images of others of their species (reacting to that animal on a TV screen
as if it were real, until they've smelled at it). But what about horses?
I dunno, and I dunno if anyone's ever bothered to check that out. Yet
the ability to translate "moving image" into "another self" is not
universal even in humans.

Which leads to theories of "emotion" in cognition. (Yes, it does, because
I said it does.) According to Pinker, there is growing evidence that
what we call emotion is an essential part of mammalian cognition--and
some artificial-intelligence researchers now believe that until they can
figure out how to replicate "emotions" in a neural net, they won't have a
true artificial intelligence. In evolutionary terms, the feeling came
first, and later the thoughts about it. Pinker considers that the
biochemical surge (which we feel as emotion) enables an organism to
"choose" between competing alternatives, and reinforces past choices as
either good or bad. In fact, recent research (published this year in
_Nature_) showed that human subjects who are bereft of emotion (due to
brain injury) are unable to make good choices even when they can
calculate and express what the good choices are, while subjects who are
emotionally intact can and do make good choices even when they cannot
explain their strategy (let alone *why* it's a good strategy.)

Thus the existing evidence suggests that emotions underlie "higher
cognition" (defined here and now for this discussion as "the stuff we
usually call thinking") and thus "higher thinking" is not a requirement
for the existence of emotions. Quite the reverse.

Moreover, all social animals have an additional load on their information
processing system--they have to be able to recognize "us" and "them", and
within "us" they have to be able to remember who's who (who is Mom, who
is Boss Mare, who is a special friend for sharing tail-switching and
back-nibbling, and who is an almost-same-level rival at the hay stack.)
All social animals expend energy and processing power on social
interactions (it's what makes them social) and the nature of social
structures have some similarities throughout mammalian species. The
biochemistry of social mammals includes responses to social events which
mediate those events and keep the social group intact. (Thus the
instantaneous surge of male hormones in the winner of a dominance
dispute--no matter what gender the combatants. The winner gets a burst
of "dominance" chemicals; the loser gets a burst of depressant...and the
conflict is over...the biochemical responses act to stabilize the social
order.)

The most basic human emotions--the ones babies have first--are very much
the same thing. Humans are social animals, and they react to direct
physical stimulus *and* social interactions (which are, in infancy and
childhood, mediated through direct physical stimulus.) In infants with
intact neurology, the physical input of the first two years produces
"sensory integration"...and along the way, the basic human emotions. The
complex emotions of human social life are complex because human social
life is complex, and it takes a complicated set of reactions to
survive...to have hierarchies of "us" and "them" relationships, for
instance ("us" as humans and not other animals, members of this culture
and not all others, this family and not all others, this team and not all
others, this newsgroup and not all others, this bunch of friends and not
all others), and react appropriately in circumstances that bring one
definition into conflict with another.

The more advanced and abstract emotions (such as an emotional response to
a beautiful painting, building, garden) still have an evolutionary,
biological, sensory-laden base. Pinker points out that research with
small children and landscapes is bolstered by the experience of landscape
gardeners--people prefer, and find beautiful, the kinds of landscapes
that you would expect a savannah-origin species to prefer. The average
person likes pictures that maximize the visual information input (that
is, brightly colored, crisply focussed, realistic), although under social
pressure people can learn to "appreciate" other styles...for social
reasons.

So human emotion is more tightly bound to sensory input than used to be
thought. When a thought generates feeling, it is usually the result of a
memory of some actual sensory experience that is processed in humans as
if it were new, and the "trigger" for that thought is often a sensory
input as well. The person to whom you take an instant dislike may have a
physical feature (eyebrows, tone of voice, smell, way of walking) similar
to someone who did you dirt in the past.

This connection to sensory input is reasonable if--as the evidence
suggests--emotions (or the biochemical reactions to events which we call
emotions in humans) predated "thought" (conscious manipulation of
symbols.)

Again, our choice to call these biochemical reactions emotions, or not to
so label them, is at this point arbitrary. There have been researchers
who denied that humans had emotions (this is not the current trend of
research, but it was a Big Idea at one time, along with the idea that
humans weren't really conscious.) (Then again, we can all think of
people who test that hypothesis...)

I'd encourage people interested in cognitive science to read Pinker's
_How the Mind Works_, Howard Gardner's _Frames of Mind_, Uta Frith's
_Autism_, Temple Grandin's _Thinking in Pictures_ , and any of Oliver
Sacks's books (which deal with a variety of neurological/cognitive
ideas). From these, you can also work your way to the other sides of the
present controversies, and the really interested can dig into the
journals. Then you can spend your time with horses devising the right
kinds of experiments/observations of horse cognition, and give the rest
of us the hard data presently lacking on how horses process information.

In the meantime, here's a thought that was running around a medical
center about 30 years ago..."Scientists don't change their minds to
encompass new ideas...what happens is the old scientists die off, and
then the new ideas (held by the "rebels") become the new orthodoxy, which
they too will cling to in the face of new evidence until *they* die."
Or, as my sergeant in the Marines said, "That's not a fact, and if it is
a fact, you can shove it." If you don't care, you don't want to read up
on it, and you want to go on holding the same opinion about horse
cognition and emotions (pro or con) you always have held...fine, that's
perfectly normal and you share your reluctance to change with some of the
best minds in history. This information was offered for the enjoyment of
those with too much time on their hands...or other reasons for being
interested. Your mileage *will* vary.

Elizabeth Moon
--
"A little raised number at the end of a statement is not an icon of
inerrancy." _British Medical Journal_

http://www.sff.net/people/Elizabeth.Moon

[CATHERINE ALEXANDRA PAFORT]

<A brilliant a most informative article from Elizabeth, rudely snipped>

> People who want to hang around horses
> usually want to ride or drive them, not give them tests of information
> processing, while people who *are* interested in how horses think usually
> lack the training to devise meaningful experiments.

Can we come up with those things that we really badly want to know? I think the
main problem would be to get into their frame of mind. A test of intelligence
can only test the intelligence of the person devising it - the famous four
animals (odd one out in 'cow, sheep, pig, chicken') have at least two equally
valid answers - the chicken, not a mammal, the pig, inedible for muslims - so
which one is 'right'? A trickle-feeding herbivore will have different
priorities and motivations from us cave-dwelling omnivores.

> Cats and dogs appear to recognize moving
> images of others of their species (reacting to that animal on a TV screen
> as if it were real, until they've smelled at it). But what about horses?

I'd say that the 'image of self' is no less than in other mammals. Imprinting
problems and horses reacting to mirrors show that. The interesting question is
not 'image of species' (it's a horse) but 'image of self' (oh, that's me).

> Pinker considers that the
> biochemical surge (which we feel as emotion) enables an organism to
> "choose" between competing alternatives, and reinforces past choices as
> either good or bad. In fact, recent research (published this year in
> _Nature_) showed that human subjects who are bereft of emotion (due to
> brain injury) are unable to make good choices even when they can
> calculate and express what the good choices are, while subjects who are
> emotionally intact can and do make good choices even when they cannot
> explain their strategy (let alone *why* it's a good strategy.)

> Thus the existing evidence suggests that emotions underlie "higher
> cognition" (defined here and now for this discussion as "the stuff we
> usually call thinking") and thus "higher thinking" is not a requirement
> for the existence of emotions. Quite the reverse.

This ties in well with the Feldenkrais research. That horses are able to learn,
and learn behaviours won't be debated by anyone here. That a horse can learn
different responses to the same stimulation and conciously choose between them
may be debatable.

IMHO the only thing we can *prove* is that horses (or other animals) are
*physically unable* to do the things we do - watching TV or driving a car -
that does not mean that the *mental* ability is necessarily missing. Likely,
but that's beside the point. How much their intelligence is inferior to ours -
is it measurable? Does it make sense? You can argue that a horse has only a
vague sense of time - most can divise between 'every day' 'a short period' (two
or three days) and 'a long time' (anything over that, so a week or three weeks
between visits don't seem to make a lot of difference to them) - but then, if I
watch myself closely, I'm no different. My *brain* tells me how many days or
weeks have passed because I have easy access to a calendar. I would go as far
as to venture that my preoccupation with numbers and counting is largely
*culturally induced* and not necessarily a 'human' as in 'species'
characteristic.

> The more advanced and abstract emotions (such as an emotional response to
> a beautiful painting, building, garden) still have an evolutionary,
> biological, sensory-laden base. Pinker points out that research with
> small children and landscapes is bolstered by the experience of landscape
> gardeners--people prefer, and find beautiful, the kinds of landscapes
> that you would expect a savannah-origin species to prefer.

That argument is widely debated in Geography. 'All landscape is a cultural
construction' anyway <g>. Some experiments seem to support it, others don't -
my personal emotional reaction to landscapes with a high level of variety and
*some* open spaces goes in the same direction.

> So human emotion is more tightly bound to sensory input than used to be
> thought. When a thought generates feeling, it is usually the result of a
> memory of some actual sensory experience that is processed in humans as
> if it were new, and the "trigger" for that thought is often a sensory
> input as well. The person to whom you take an instant dislike may have a
> physical feature (eyebrows, tone of voice, smell, way of walking) similar
> to someone who did you dirt in the past.

On the other hand you often have an 'instinctive' reaction to someone who's
perfectly *nice* and civil on the surface. You just don't feel totally at ease
with them. I find that my gut reactions to people and horses alike are usually
to be trusted. Not *always* - I didn't like Mork until I actually rode him -
but mostly. Some people say that humans tend to overanalyse our emotions ('what
is it I don't like about him - that's nonsense') instead of accepting them as
an alternate, but equally valid framework for decisions. Without wanting to be
sexist, it seems that men seem to be putting greater importance on *logically
explainable* decisions than women.

> This information was offered for the enjoyment of
> those with too much time on their hands...or other reasons for being
> interested.

Thanks a lot!

Catja

[Tivers]

Elizabeth,

Your treatise was wonderful. I wonder if you'd consider letting me use it in
it's entirety (a few small edits) in my newsletter, Racing Science Review.

ti
Tom Ivers
Author: The Fit Racehorse I & II, six other books.
Current column: Keiba Book, Japan
Publisher: Racing Science Review
President: Equine Racing Systems, Inc.
211 Skye Rd.
Washougal, WA 98671
(360) 837-2102 (vox/fax)

[Jessica Snyder]

Jorene Downs wrote:

> Elizabeth, for the benefit of those of us lacking the background to
> do much more than stand in bewildered awe of your in-depth
> discussion, could you put together a brief summary ... in layman's
> language?

I don't want to step on any toes, but I can try and give a brief
summary of some of the pertinent points I remember from Elizabeth's
post. (And please, if I get them wrong, let me know!).

Actually, I have a better thought; I'll give a brief summary of
the stuff that I have knowledge of that I think is pertinent to the
point I thought Elizabeth was trying to make (which is, essentially,
that
the basic brain structures needed for emotion are present in horses
and humans and most "upper" mammals... is that right, Elizabeth?)
Gosh, I hope that made *some* sense to somebody. Anyway...

First off, lets recall that most of us mammals evolved from the
same original critters. So, we all had similar starts to our brains.
Second, and one of the key factors in understanding how people
and animals think and feel, is the fact that as brains evolve
into more complicated formats, they tend to only build on existing
structures. What that means is that the basic "mouse" or "lizard"
brain that we all started with, which is mostly instict and sensory
equipment, is *still* in our heads. We just added more complicated
stuff on top of it. So underneath all our fancy cognition equipment
(i.e., the cortex) is a basic lizard-brain that still functions
as such.

When talking about emotions, it is important to remember that the
majority of our "basic" emotions (anger, fear, happiness, etc.) are
*still* rooted in that lizard brain (limbic system, I think). And,
that we have that portion of our brain in common with most mammals
(not identical, but similar enough that when dissecting them, the same
bits are easy to find. This I know :). Everything we think and feel
and perceive is filtered through that base brain first, and then
travels through the more complex layers before finally reaching
the level at which we are consciously aware of it. An example of
this is something that has probably happened to us all; someone says
something that makes you furious, and you feel that wave of fury
*before* you fully decipher the details of what they said. This
is because the information gets to your emotional center before it
gets to your conscious processing center (time lag of a few
milliseconds).
And the reason it gets to the emotions before the conscious part
is because the emotional centers are connected to the base (lizard)
brain structures; they are more primitive, and they get stuff first.

What does that have to do with horses, you may ask? Well, they share
our basic "lizard brain" constructs; they are capable of feeling
many of the emotions that we are feeling. What they are not capable
of doing is analyzing and processing those emotions through a self-
reflective analysis center (i.e., a vastly complex cortex like ours).
What it boils down to is that it's sheer foolishness to claim that
horses don't have emotions like anger, or fear, or yes, even love.
(Not love as we know it probably, but a more basic "being near this
person/creature makes me happy" thing). They have very similar
emotional structures in their brains as we do, and hence should feel
similar emotions.

As to their cognitive abilities, that is largely untested (as Elizabeth
said). Horses don't have a lot of cortex; they are mainly creatures
of instinct. But they *can* learn, and they can learn more than
simple stimulus-response patterns. The details of how their brain
processes information isn't known to us yet, though.

Gosh, that wasn't a short summary... but I hope it was understandable
and, better yet, close to the original topic in question! :)

Jessica
-------------------------------------------------------------
jrsn...@students.wisc.edu in Madison, WI and the critters:
Tap (devious and lazy Arabian Wonder-Horse in the making)
Kosh (bringer of Belgian Tervuren Rocket-Dog chaos)
Nikki and Pixel (Demon Cats from Hell)
and Keith, the marvelous husband who tolerates us all
-------------------------------------------------------------

[Jorene Downs]

Tom Stovall <sto...@wt.net> wrote:

>Elizabeth Moon wrote:
>>
>> For those interested in the science behind various assertions on equine
>> cognition, "emotions", and the direction science is headed right now,
>> here are some current trends in cognitive science (with a few references,

>>but only a few since we throw journals out after about 18 months, due to lack of space.)...
>>
>
>[deletia]
>
>Damn Ms. Moon, that was a heluva post.

Sure can tell Elizabeth has had some serious writing experience, but
I suspect what I muddled through was *not* intended to be fantasy /
science fiction! ;-/

>I don't understane any more than I did, but I realize I have
>company that's a lot smarter than me.

Whew! Glad to know I wasn't the only one who got left in the dust!

>The original question deals with horses displaying emotion;
>the answer seems to be dependent on how one defines
>"emotion".

Elizabeth, for the benefit of those of us lacking the background to
do much more than stand in bewildered awe of your in-depth
discussion, could you put together a brief summary ... in layman's
language?

(posted & mailed)

- - -
Jorene
just moseyin' down the California trails ... :)

Meet other rec.eq posters on:
http://www.psnw.com/~jcdowns/RecEq/RecEq.html

[Elizabeth Moon]

Jorene Downs wrote:
(some clipped)

>
> Elizabeth, for the benefit of those of us lacking the background to
> do much more than stand in bewildered awe of your in-depth
> discussion, could you put together a brief summary ... in layman's
> language?
>
> (posted & mailed)
>
> - - -
> Jorene
> just moseyin' down the California trails ... :)
>
> Meet other rec.eq posters on:
> http://www.psnw.com/~jcdowns/RecEq/RecEq.html

Jorene, there's nothing to be in awe of...just the outcome of having a
kid with serious cognitive/emotional developmental problems and
discovering that the existing medical literature was about as adequate
as, say, the sloppier children's fiction is about real horses. (Not the
*good* kids' horse books, but those others...you know the kind...)
Mother-tiger instinct took over, and I started looking for useful
information anywhere I could find it...which happened to be on the front
lines of cognitive science, esp. where it was joining up with the
computer stuff. I'm no smarter than anyone else, just spent the past
12-14 years digging into that particular area. I was just plain lucky in
having the pre-existing bits of experience that made it possible for me
to understand what I was reading.

Steven Pinker's _How the Mind Works_ is pretty readable (of the ones I
mentioned, one of the most readable) and will cover all the stuff I left
out (or forgot, or whatever.) Gardner is important, but his style is to
reading what eating flour is to nutrition...you can get calories
(information) that way, but it's dry and stodgy. Temple Grandin's book
is particularly interesting in light of both her work in livestock
handling facilities, and her personal history (she's autistic, with
biologically-based differences in how her emotions hook up to her
experiences.)

Summary...sheesh. It's kinda like horse training--there are some
short-cuts, but you just can't get as much into 60 days of training as
into 90, and not as much into 90 as into a solid year. I don't want to
falsify anything...and I'm afraid if I cut it shorter, I'll be leaving
out important stuff. Oliver Sacks is a wonderful read (and most of his
books are fairly short, with shortish chapters) and he has a deep
background in the overlap of neurology with psychology (though not in
animals.)

I can answer *some* specific questions in email, at least by pointing
people to the source from which I took that part and in some cases by
explaining at greater length, but I don't think I can make it all shorter
without either making it harder to understand (like a compressed file...)
or leaving things out. Tell you what--when I get the roof fixed, the
ceiling un-mildewed, Cricket's eye healed up (she got a conjunctivitis in
one eye) and the current book finished--oh yeah, and the house clean and
Thanksgiving dinner over and done with and the mess cleaned up--I'll try
putting some of this up on my web page and see if I can do a better job
of it.

ObHorse: The Cricket got out of her blanket last night when only the
chest strap was unbuckled (no, I don't know how she unbuckled it.) I
found the blanket lying on the shavings in the shed, all its buckles
still fastened but the one, and the unblanketed Cricket standing by the
gate of the pen, chatting with Kuincey over the gate. I remonstrated
with her, but she was unrepentant. (Repentance is not a feeling I
attribute to horses--this is a *joke*.) I hope she's not going to turn
into a Houdini horse.

Elizabeth

[Jorene Downs]

Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> wrote:

>Jorene Downs wrote:
>(some clipped)
>>
>> Elizabeth, for the benefit of those of us lacking the background to
>> do much more than stand in bewildered awe of your in-depth
>> discussion, could you put together a brief summary ... in layman's
>> language?

>Jorene, there's nothing to be in awe of...just the outcome of having a
>kid with serious cognitive/emotional developmental problems [...]

>Mother-tiger instinct took over, and I started looking for useful

>information anywhere I could find it...[...] I was just plain lucky in

>having the pre-existing bits of experience that made it possible for me
>to understand what I was reading.

When I saw the subject line I figured the topic was something you'd
stayed on top of for Michael, knowing you to be a Mother-tiger. ;)

[...]

>Summary...sheesh. It's kinda like horse training--there are some
>short-cuts, but you just can't get as much into 60 days of training as
>into 90, and not as much into 90 as into a solid year. I don't want to
>falsify anything...and I'm afraid if I cut it shorter, I'll be leaving

>out important stuff. [...]

Well, just about anything related to "science" is an obscure foreign
language to me. (Avoided it like the plague in college!) Shucks, I'm
still trying to figure out what *subject* you were talking about,
and you're worried about losing a few intricate details! :)))

>[...] I'll try putting some of this up on my web page and see if I can do a better job
>of it.

Thanks! And I'll try re-reading your original. See if I can pick up
a few clues to build on ... ;)

>ObHorse: The Cricket got out of her blanket last night when only the

>chest strap was unbuckled (no, I don't know how she unbuckled it.) [...]

>I hope she's not going to turn into a Houdini horse.

It was an equine plot to give you a mystery to work through! ;)

- If Kuincy looked particularly innocent, I'd check the blanket for
teeth marks to see if she helped Cricket undress. The bay mare was
probably so pleased with her clever assistance that she got overly
enthusiastic and snagged a tooth on a thread or something while she
was grinning wickedly. Check Kuincy's teeth for a snagged piece of
thread.Evidence. <WG>

- The butler did it, of course.

- Ya got a Houdini horse!!!

[Jorene Downs]

jcd...@strategic-vision.com (Jorene Downs) wrote:

>Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> wrote:
[...]

>>[...] I'll try putting some of this up on my web page and see if I can do a better job
>>of it.
>
>Thanks! And I'll try re-reading your original. See if I can pick up
>a few clues to build on ... ;)

OK, I took another stab at it - this time started reading before
midnight ;) - and it makes much more sense now ... I think. ;)

To make sure I stayed on track, I checked the WWWebsters Dictionary
and found the following definitions:

** cognition:
" the act or process of knowing including both awareness and
judgment; also : a product of this act"

** cognitive science
"an interdisciplinary science that draws on many fields (as
psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy) in
developing theories about human perception, thinking, and learning"

I'm going to try putting together a real basic summary, and let you
tell me where I got confused. Hope my layman's terms and perspective
don't confuse it more. ;)

The mammal mind "foundation" is the same, but the input is processed
differently by the different mammals ... who have varied evolutions
of brain added to that foundation. The input is received through the
various sensory options (smell, vision, etc). The various mammals
rely on their various kinds of sensory input differently.
Experience is an important factor in how the mammal is likely to
respond to the input. Some mammals - not limited to humans - can
learn "experience" through observation, and respond similarly to
what was observed when later in a similar situation.

Existing / traditional thought says "emotion" is only possible from
mammals with higher levels of cognition, but this may not be
correct. Contemporary theory suggests that basic emotions may occur
prior to cognition. Artificial intelligence research is considering
the possibility that they'll need to somehow replicate emotions to
create true artificial intelligence.

In mammals, some form of memory / recollection is necessary for
those with social interaction (for identification purposes, learning
the group's methods of communication, etc.) Individual biochemistry
plays a part in response and processing of input and situations.
Biochemical reactions in humans are considered by some to
essentially be basic / primitive emotions. Since that "foundation"
in the brain is the same, the theory could be applied to other
mammals, including equines.

So - in theory - the actual order of processing would be sensory
input, biochemical reactions / basic emotions, and some degree of
cognition. The amount of impact of the sensory input on "emotions"
- and cognition - would presumably vary in the different mammals, as
would the amount of impact of basic emotions on cognition. Several
people have published works supporting the theory, and there is
ongoing research based on existing evidence.

In theory, equines have basic emotions that respond to sensory
input, and those emotions would influence the equine cognition
process and response. Of course <G>, very little study has occurred
regarding equines in this area.

So, did I manage to get a general handle on this? Anyplace where I'm
obviously off track, or missed a major point?

(posted & mailed)

[Elizabeth Moon]

Jorene Downs wrote:
(some snipped)

>
> I'm going to try putting together a real basic summary, and let you
> tell me where I got confused. Hope my layman's terms and perspective
> don't confuse it more. ;)
>
> The mammal mind "foundation" is the same, but the input is processed
> differently by the different mammals ... who have varied evolutions
> of brain added to that foundation.

Uh--I'm not sure if we mean the same thing by "foundation" here, and it's
important. If you mean a little generalist ancestral mammalian brain,
that's not it. All mammalian brains are made up of functional modules,
each of which does a certain kind of processing--and the modules are
cross-connected into a neural-net arrangement, which allows communication
between modules, and allows one to influence another. All mammals so far
tested require sensory input at specific developmental periods in order
for the processing module for that sense to develop normally. (That is,
if you patch an animal's eyes in infancy, for the entire "sensitive
period," it will not see enormally later, even though the sensory organ
is normal.) Sensory deprivation, even in mature animals, results in
re-organization of the brain itself.

The specific modules vary from one mammal to another, in size and
complexity of processing, and this is clearly related to both the sensory
organs (size, sensitivity, complexity) and the mammal's ecological niche
(predator, prey, scavenger, herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous,
land-dwelling, tree-dwelling, water-dwelling, etc.) But the basic
mammalian brain is modular, interconnected, and requires early
sensory-integration to function right.

> The input is received through the
> various sensory options (smell, vision, etc). The various mammals
> rely on their various kinds of sensory input differently.

To the extent that their sensory apparatus is different (some see better
in dim light, some hear higher frequencies), this is true--but all seeing
animals use their sight as at least part of their way of getting around.

> Experience is an important factor in how the mammal is likely to
> respond to the input. Some mammals - not limited to humans - can
> learn "experience" through observation, and respond similarly to
> what was observed when later in a similar situation.
>

Yes, though you could make it even stronger. Experience is not just "an"
important factor, it is *the* reason that animals respond as they do;
early experience sets up the processing for that sense, and determines
how an animal will interpret a sensory signal.

Many mammals (all social mammals) can learn *some* from direct
observation--they have imitative skills. The young learn from the adults
in the social group, by doing what the adults do. Dolphins have learned
entire routines by watching another animal in training, and would then
respond correctly to the same cues.

Some animals have, in addition, the ability to recognize symbolic
(abstract) representations, such as video or audio tapes, and to react to
these attenuated versions of reality as if they were real (the monkeys
acting scared of a hose on the floor after seeing other monkey acting
scared on a videotape, the dog barking at a dog on television.) Humans
can learn (though not as easily) by indirect symbolic methods, such as
books. Still, most people find it easier to learn a physical skill by
watching someone who has it, rather than by reading a book or being told
(without a demonstration) how to do it.

> Existing / traditional thought says "emotion" is only possible from
> mammals with higher levels of cognition, but this may not be
> correct.

A point of history I didn't bring up before. Prior to the serious study
of cognition, traditional thought was that the hierarchy of living things
ran from plants (which were alive, but not thought to have feeling or
consciousness, let along thought) to animals (which had feeling and
emotion but not thought) to humans (who had feeling, emotion, and
thought.) The theory that only humans had emotions (if humans did--the
point was disputed hotly) was a product of the late 19th and early 20th
century debunking of traditional thought. So the "new" theory of
cognition has traditional roots--rational thought co-exists with emotion,
but is not necessary to it.

> Contemporary theory suggests that basic emotions may occur
> prior to cognition.

Not exactly, but sort of. It suggests that emotion and cognition are
co-existent and intertwined...that the computations in the mammalian
brain which are associated with those neurotransmitters we feel as
emotions *are* cognition (albeit primitive cognition). In the
evolutionary sense, these biochemical reactions predate anything we would
call "thought" (conscious thought, intentional calculation, etc.)

In the individual cognitive act, in a mammal capable of any kind of
conscious problem-solving, the emotional response to the situation
precedes the calculation and may pre-empt the response. (That is, if the
experienced deer smells a wolf, it does not stand there and think
"Hmm--that smells like a wolf--now what am I supposed to do if I smell a
wolf? Oh, that's right, run away." The "wolfsmell-fear-run" connection
doesn't wait for analysis. Any deer that stops to think gets eaten.)

> Artificial intelligence research is considering
> the possibility that they'll need to somehow replicate emotions to
> create true artificial intelligence.

Yes, because without emotional loading the programming isn't sufficient
to get a truly intelligent response (esp. from mobile units.) Emotion
seems to be necessary in a variety of areas, including motivation,
persistence, attention control, and choice of processing/logical paths.

> In mammals, some form of memory / recollection is necessary for
> those with social interaction (for identification purposes, learning
> the group's methods of communication, etc.) Individual biochemistry
> plays a part in response and processing of input and situations.

Some form of memory is necessary for any living thing to respond in the
observed way to input...for learning, in other words. (At the cellular
level, if our immune systems couldn't "remember" what diseases we'd had,
or been exposed to, they couldn't respond to protect us.) Mammals are,
as a group, pretty good at this. Social mammals do have more demand on
their processing than solitary ones--a demand repaid by the survival
advantages of being member of a group.

The transmission of data to the brain, and the processing of it, are done
by biochemical means (to produce electrical signals, but the electricity
is made by biochemistry.) Variations in individual biochemistry do
results in individual variations in sensory sensitivity and processing
(and this is true within one individual in different circumstances. If
you've ever run a high fever, you know that your senses can become
painfully acute, and then--as you get sicker--begin to dull.)

> Biochemical reactions in humans are considered by some to
> essentially be basic / primitive emotions.

No...sorry. All emotions (not just basic/primitive) are mediated by
biochemical changes. The higher emotions are just the basic emotions
triggered by less immediate and physical input. Example: if you are
angry because someone slapped you, that produces a characteristic set of
biochemical changes in your body (not only the brain--also
blood-pressure, skin turgor, muscular tension, shunting of blood from the
digestive tract to the skeletal muscles, etc.) But if you are angry
because someone cut you off in traffic, or you got a nasty letter from a
former friend, or you saw a politician on TV say something really stupid,
or you heard third-hand that someone had insulted someone else whom you
liked...your anger will be expressed physically in the same chemicals.
In other words, humans can attach the same basic emotion to symbols and
abstractions, which other animals attach to a particular physical cause.
Humans tend to name their emotions differently when they're attached to
symbols remote from direct experience, rather than look at the
biochemical bases, and the physical reaction.

> Since that "foundation"
> in the brain is the same, the theory could be applied to other
> mammals, including equines.

Again, I'm not sure of what you mean by foundation. The basics of the
mammalian brain--its modular processing combined with interconnections
between modules, its similar biochemical surges associated with common
experiences, its need for sensory input in order to function normally--is
the same in horses and humans. But quite clearly a horse brain and a
human brain aren't the same. So the theory would predict that they would
react differently to inputs sensed differently and processed differently
(in either amount or kind), but that some reactions would be the same
(even though the inputs "causing" them might be different.) For
instance, a scared horse and a scared human both shunt blood from the
digestive tract to the skeletal muscles; both may defecate or urinate;
both may have muscular tremors and attempt to escape from the frightening
stimulus. But the horse might have been attacked by a predator, while
the human might have received a letter with a death threat. Cognitive
science as it is today is based on research in many species, not just
humans, and has shown the similarity of processing within specific
modules across species.

> So - in theory - the actual order of processing would be sensory
> input, biochemical reactions / basic emotions, and some degree of
> cognition. The amount of impact of the sensory input on "emotions"
> - and cognition - would presumably vary in the different mammals, as
> would the amount of impact of basic emotions on cognition.

The actual sequence of events in a cognitive act is more complicated than
input-emotion-cognition (if any)-behavior. Only recently (and
incompletely) have scientists been able to detect brain activity with
both the spatial accuracy (locating small active areas in the brain) and
the temporal accuracy (noticing rapid changes in activity) to begin to
find out exactly how this works--so this is all incomplete (though good
as far as it goes.)

Primary sensory data travels through sensory nerves to the brain, but may
be pre-sorted (so to speak) in the sensory organ (esp. the eye, about
which more is known.) A portion of that signal may be routed directly to
the limbic system at the same time. (The limbic system, and the amygdala
within it, are the core of emotional response and are closely linked to
memory.) There the signal may trigger an emotional response before the
rest of the signal has been processed fully...and this emotional signal
may in turn pre-empt a behavioral response, in an individual who has had
a lot of experience with that input. (You may hit the brake at the sight
of a red light before your visual processing centers have actually
finished processing the whole visual input.) The rest of the signal
enters the lowest level of information processing for that sense, and is
bumped upward until it is fully processed. In humans, a visual input may
also trigger activity in the auditory processing system (esp. the
language areas) as the viewer thinks of the word which matches the
picture. At this point (in humans) conscious cognition begins. (It's
not a red traffic light, but someone just turned on the overhanging
Christmas lights; you take your foot off the brake and drive on.)

Pre-existing emotions (being angry or frightened, for instance) can drown
out the small signal from the amygdala--one reason emotionally distraught
drivers can go right through a red light and claim they never saw it (or
realized only after going through that it was red.) Emotional arousal
affects cognition and learning, at all levels from sensory sensitivity to
higher thought, which is why parents and teachers try to teach children
to "control" their emotions, while at the same time urging them to "get
excited" about learning.

But even at the level of conscious thought, emotional responses color and
mediate the processing. They weight certain lines of computation, and
thus influence motivation, persistence, and attention itself. In the
complex human brain, with a lot of memory and a lot of complicated social
interaction in its path, a chance association of some new input with a
bit of old data may spark an emotional reaction which determines how the
new input will be handled. These "irrational" associations can bump a
line of reasoning completely off one track and onto another.

The artificial brains (so far) are faster processors, and much more
predictable...but they don't generate novel lines of thinking with
anything like human facility. They can't handle, for example, rapid
changes of topic and multiple topics the way human conversation can.

Except for those animals (humans for sure, and a few others we're fairly
sure of) who can respond to non-real (symbolic, abstract,
representational) input, all animals respond to sensory input, and the
combination of sensory input and experience determines the biochemical
and behavioral response to that input. So the influence of sensory input
on the critter's "emotional" response (taking, for the purpose of this
discussion, one of the classical biochemical changes as an "emotion") is
mediated only by the critter's ability to remember past episodes of the
same input. A novel input, or an input that is not remembered, can
trigger only a primary response (pleasure, pain) while one that is
remembered (or is similar enough) can trigger a secondary response as
well, by hooking into the memory/emotion/response part of the brain.

(snipped)

>
> In theory, equines have basic emotions that respond to sensory
> input, and those emotions would influence the equine cognition
> process and response. Of course <G>, very little study has occurred
> regarding equines in this area.

In theory, equines have a mammalian brain, which ought--within the limits
of their sensory equipment and their processing modules--to function like
other mammalian brains. Where behavior and biochemistry suggest a
response to input which is the same as or very similar to "emotional"
response in other animals and humans, where a neuroactive drug has the
same effect on a horse as on a human with a similar behavior pattern (as
in obsessive-compulsive disorder in humans, and some "compulsive"
behaviors in horses), the horse's response could be labelled "emotion"
without straining the meaning of the term. (It isn't necessary to label
these complexes of biochemistry and behavior as emotions, though
"emotion" is the most compact label for the complex.)

However, if you agree that a horse's fear is the same as other mammalian
fear (including ours) in terms of both biochemical changes and behavior
(attempting to run away, trembling, eyes wide, etc.), or that horses can
"grieve" for the loss of a favorite companion (showing the same
depression, loss of appetite, lack of voluntary movement, lack of
interest in normal social interaction as humans) this does not imply that
horses feel about every situation in the way that people do.

Horses are horses, with a horse brain; even if a horse bonds to a person,
it is doing so as a horse (just as when it bonds to a goat or a calf,
it's bonding to that animal as a horse, not suddenly thinking like a goat
or calf.) A horse is capable of the full range of social connections
observable in natural horse herds--we have no idea if it's capable of
more than that. (Although the evident attachment of some horses to
non-horse animals suggests that it might be.) It's not reasonable to
deny, in the face of the evidence, that horses to have preferential bonds
with others; it's also not reasonable to overstate what that means.
Similarly, a horse which bonds to a person will do so as a horse, and may
do with that person what it would do with other horses (including
finding the way home through bad weather, give warning of predators,
etc.)--but it's not going to call the doctor or make chicken soup if
you're sick. It's going to be out in the lot whinnying for breakfast,
water, and attention.

Elizabeth

[Deborah Stevenson]

In <3479FB...@sff.net> Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> writes:

>In the individual cognitive act, in a mammal capable of any kind of
>conscious problem-solving, the emotional response to the situation
>precedes the calculation and may pre-empt the response. (That is, if the
>experienced deer smells a wolf, it does not stand there and think
>"Hmm--that smells like a wolf--now what am I supposed to do if I smell a
>wolf? Oh, that's right, run away." The "wolfsmell-fear-run" connection
>doesn't wait for analysis. Any deer that stops to think gets eaten.)

Right, this is what we've been trying to get to in earlier discussions.
It's like yanking your hand away from the flame--you don't think "really,
this is far too warm to hold comfortably, I shall remove my digits in a
short time," the hand just moves and then you say "Whoa, that was hot!"
I think saying "The horse spooked because he thought the rock was was a
bear" is similarly an inaccurate overexplanation--the thought process in
between happens in the mind of the human who explained it.

>Some form of memory is necessary for any living thing to respond in the
>observed way to input...for learning, in other words. (At the cellular
>level, if our immune systems couldn't "remember" what diseases we'd had,
>or been exposed to, they couldn't respond to protect us.) Mammals are,
>as a group, pretty good at this. Social mammals do have more demand on
>their processing than solitary ones--a demand repaid by the survival
>advantages of being member of a group.

You're probably familiar with the tragic and fascinating example of the
music conductor in Britain, whose brain damage after either encephalitis or
meningitis destroyed his memory and his memory faculty--he had a notebook
filled with thousands of repeated exclamations about how finally he was
fully awake and aware for the first time in his life; each time he wrote
it it was, as far as his ability to process memory was concerned, true,
since he didn't have access to any of the other times.

>The transmission of data to the brain, and the processing of it, are done
>by biochemical means (to produce electrical signals, but the electricity
>is made by biochemistry.)

Which always makes me think of the brain as a big potato clock :-).

>Variations in individual biochemistry do
>results in individual variations in sensory sensitivity and processing
>(and this is true within one individual in different circumstances. If
>you've ever run a high fever, you know that your senses can become
>painfully acute, and then--as you get sicker--begin to dull.)

Or to give another example--I'm having thyroid problems again. This
cuts my concentration to shreds. (This becomes particularly noticeable
when it improves to normal again.) It also affects my memory in small
ways--what I would think of as the mental equivalent to fine motor
skills, such as shadings of vocabulary usage and so forth.

>No...sorry. All emotions (not just basic/primitive) are mediated by
>biochemical changes. The higher emotions are just the basic emotions
>triggered by less immediate and physical input. Example: if you are
>angry because someone slapped you, that produces a characteristic set of
>biochemical changes in your body (not only the brain--also
>blood-pressure, skin turgor, muscular tension, shunting of blood from the
>digestive tract to the skeletal muscles, etc.) But if you are angry
>because someone cut you off in traffic, or you got a nasty letter from a
>former friend, or you saw a politician on TV say something really stupid,
>or you heard third-hand that someone had insulted someone else whom you
>liked...your anger will be expressed physically in the same chemicals.
>In other words, humans can attach the same basic emotion to symbols and
>abstractions, which other animals attach to a particular physical cause.

Sort a physical correlation to language; we can feel about things in
their absence as well as talk about them. This discussion had earlier
been differentiating on the basis that horses apparently *can't* do
that--they don't make themselves happy with childhood memories (pace
Black Beauty) or brood on old injustices as they hang out in the pasture.

It would seem to me that this is the difference that gets lost sometimes
when talking about horses. I do hear people attributing undesirable
horse behavior to something along the lines of brooding in the
pasture--basically, to overlook the direct stimuli causing the behavior
in favor of (wrongly) attributing some secondary/mediated cause.

>Humans tend to name their emotions differently when they're attached to
>symbols remote from direct experience, rather than look at the
>biochemical bases, and the physical reaction.

I'm not quite sure what you mean--are you saying that humans use
different terms for essentially the same biochemical surge depending on
whether it's directly or secondarily stimulated? Perhaps not, because I'm
having a hard time thinking up examples.

>Horses are horses, with a horse brain; even if a horse bonds to a person,
>it is doing so as a horse (just as when it bonds to a goat or a calf,
>it's bonding to that animal as a horse, not suddenly thinking like a goat
>or calf.) A horse is capable of the full range of social connections
>observable in natural horse herds--we have no idea if it's capable of
>more than that. (Although the evident attachment of some horses to
>non-horse animals suggests that it might be.) It's not reasonable to
>deny, in the face of the evidence, that horses to have preferential bonds
>with others; it's also not reasonable to overstate what that means.
>Similarly, a horse which bonds to a person will do so as a horse, and may
>do with that person what it would do with other horses (including
>finding the way home through bad weather, give warning of predators,
>etc.)--but it's not going to call the doctor or make chicken soup if
>you're sick. It's going to be out in the lot whinnying for breakfast,
>water, and attention.

I thought this deserved reprint. While we may have a relationship with
our horses, it's foolish to think it's the same relationship for them as
it is for us.

Deborah Stevenson (stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Firing up the old neurons in Champaign, IL, USA

[Jorene Downs]

Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> wrote:

>Jorene Downs wrote:
> (some snipped)
>>
>> I'm going to try putting together a real basic summary, and let you
>> tell me where I got confused. Hope my layman's terms and perspective
>> don't confuse it more. ;)

<major snipping>

>Not exactly, but sort of.

This comment seems to sum up the extent of my vague understanding
<G> ... but thanks to your clarifications, hopefully not quite as
vague as before! ;)

<more major snipping>

>Horses are horses, with a horse brain; even if a horse bonds to a person,
>it is doing so as a horse (just as when it bonds to a goat or a calf,
>it's bonding to that animal as a horse, not suddenly thinking like a goat
>or calf.) A horse is capable of the full range of social connections
>observable in natural horse herds--we have no idea if it's capable of
>more than that. (Although the evident attachment of some horses to
>non-horse animals suggests that it might be.) It's not reasonable to
>deny, in the face of the evidence, that horses to have preferential bonds
>with others; it's also not reasonable to overstate what that means.
>Similarly, a horse which bonds to a person will do so as a horse, and may
>do with that person what it would do with other horses (including
>finding the way home through bad weather, give warning of predators,
>etc.)--but it's not going to call the doctor or make chicken soup if
>you're sick. It's going to be out in the lot whinnying for breakfast,
>water, and attention.

Bingo! It was heavy wading getting through Cognitive Science 101 <G>
but this last paragraph certainly makes sense to me. And it
provides an excellent incentive for every horse person to pay more
serious attention to herd dynamics and individual horse behavior ...
and to try and relate and communicate according to the *horse's*
perspective. I'll just use the microwave if I want chicken soup. ;)

Thanks for taking the time to clarify, Elizabeth ... especially with
such things as a leaky roof to deal with! Hope all is back under
control.

[Ye Olde Mean Vile & Evil Muleskinner]

EWestfall wrote:

>CMNewell wrote:
>> EWestfall wrote:
>> >CATHERINE ALEXANDRA PAFORT wrote:
>> >> ... A test of intelligence

>> >> can only test the intelligence of the person devising it - the famous four
>> >> animals (odd one out in 'cow, sheep, pig, chicken') have at least two equally
>> >> valid answers - the chicken, not a mammal, the pig, inedible for muslims - so
>> >> which one is 'right'?

>> >As one who has problems picking the 'right' answers to these tests: a
>> >cow is out because it is used as a work animal plowing the fields, and a
>> >sheep is out because its coat is commonly used in warm blankets and
>> >itchy sweaters. <sheepish grin>
>> Another answer would be that cows, sheep, and pigs all have
>> cloven hooves, while chickens have 4 toes.
[...]
>Cows, pigs and sheep have all been ridden by adventuresome kids.
>Chickens couldn't hold the weight. <Big bird, on the other hand....>

The sheep is out, because Liotti's out back helpin' it over the fence.

>Cows were driven great distances by romantic men on horseback up the
>Chisholm and Western Trails to market, while the lowly pigs, sheep and
>chickens ...

On reconsideration, let's not go there, eh?

>Pigs do well on intelligent tests: sheep, chickens and cows don't.

Yes, but do Yorkshires do better than javelinas?

"Serene" *Sheila Green* "Sagacity" [aka Word Warrior green*@tristate.pgh.net]
"Eat me, and use your head for better than the absorption of monitor radiation."

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/sci.math/chanquayherm/53jddq$c...@news1.t1.usa.pipeline.com
http://www.olympus.net/personal/pvd/LamIntro.html#Interdigitate
http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.htm

[Ye Olde Mean Vile & Evil Muleskinner]

Elizabeth Moon wrote:
[great stuff as usual, including this:]

>Some animals have, in addition, the ability to recognize symbolic
>(abstract) representations, such as video or audio tapes, and to react to
>these attenuated versions of reality as if they were real (the monkeys
>acting scared of a hose on the floor after seeing other monkey acting

>scared on a videotape, the dog barking at a dog on television.) ...

How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
to anything managed by them as abstraction?

Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
at the one on the television screen?

[Joyce Reynolds-Ward]

On Mon, 08 Dec 1997 20:01:24 GMT, ro...@your.innate.potentialities (Ye
Olde Mean Vile & Evil Muleskinner) wrote:
snip

>How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
>what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
>to anything managed by them as abstraction?
>
>Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
>to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
>and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
>at the one on the television screen?

Hmm.

Gotta wonder, though, what my horses were thinking and/or seeing when
I used to ride them over to the neighbor's house for a visit. The
horses would stick their heads inside and watch adventure shows, and
the clear favorite (judging from equine interest in TV watching rather
than grazing) was "It Takes A Thief."

Maybe they were all Robert Wagner fans?

Of course, perhaps the old Sparkle mare was just absorbing new Houdini
tricks--she *did* appear to improve her "magic knot untying lips and
teeth" after a few sessions of "It Takes A Thief."

jrw

[Jane H. Kilberg]

In article <omYi.18$kp.4...@news.sgi.net>, SheilaGreen@Freedom wrote:

> Elizabeth Moon wrote:
> [great stuff as usual, including this:]
>

> >Some animals have, in addition, the ability to recognize symbolic
> >(abstract) representations, such as video or audio tapes, and to react to
> >these attenuated versions of reality as if they were real (the monkeys
> >acting scared of a hose on the floor after seeing other monkey acting

> >scared on a videotape, the dog barking at a dog on television.) ...

>
> How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
> what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
> to anything managed by them as abstraction?
>
> Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
> to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
> and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
> at the one on the television screen?

Don't know Sheila but when my house was being built, the horses wondered in
and out. I moved in and left the door open while attending some of the
crews working. Three of the horses wondered in. They left their apples in
the bathroom. Now, how did they know where to take a shit! <SEG>

down the tejas trails....
jane kilberg & her GOS (Gang of Spots) in the great nation of tejas

[Elizabeth Moon]

Jane H. Kilberg wrote:
>
> In article <omYi.18$kp.4...@news.sgi.net>, SheilaGreen@Freedom wrote:(E. Moon's stuff snipped)

> > How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
> > what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
> > to anything managed by them as abstraction?
> >
> > Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
> > to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
> > and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
> > at the one on the television screen?
>
> Don't know Sheila but when my house was being built, the horses wondered in
> and out. I moved in and left the door open while attending some of the
> crews working. Three of the horses wondered in. They left their apples in
> the bathroom. Now, how did they know where to take a shit! <SEG>
>
> down the tejas trails....
> jane kilberg & her GOS (Gang of Spots) in the great nation of tejas

Hi--my news server just started working again in a reasonable way (for
two weeks it was loading maybe 4 rec.eq messages a day, and these were
replies to things I never saw.) So--while I like to reply directly to
people, I'm having to reply to a reply here.

First a disclaimer--I don't claim to know what precisely any critter
(human or animal or bird or fish) is "thinking" when it reacts to sensory
input. This isn't so much scientific attitude as the fact that most
times when people describe what they think is going on in *my* head,
they're wrong. ("I know just how you feel," someone says. "Not likely,"
I think, and usually I'm right.)

However, Sheila's question brings up a very important point for anyone
interested in cognition (human or other). It does require dragging in
some history as well as some cognitive science--I'll try to make it
pertinent to horses where it's possible. To keep this "short", I'll
stick to visual input only.

Back a few hundred years, people who thought about thinking were sure
that what you saw formed a direct image in the eye, and that image was
recognized (after "learning") all-of-a-piece. In other words, you saw a
tree--the image of the tree was taken in by the eye and the mind, and
that was it. They did not concern themselves with the oddities of visual
perception: for instance, if you know that a table is a round table, you
perceive the top as circular even when you see it from an angle where it
is (to a camera) an oval. You do this without being taught about
perspective. If you know that it is a white table, you see it as a white
table in most variations of natural light (and will think of it as a
white table even if someone hangs a red light over it.) Once past
infancy, you recognize familiar objects from all sorts of angles, and
"see" them with many of their attributes (color, texture, shape) held
constant.

In European art, from the Renaissance onward, artists found more and more
ways to render images on both flat and curved surfaces so that they
appeared "real"...including the use of perspective. This led to the
discovery that the eye could be fooled (Greek architects had figured out
how to use a subtle arch in a building to make it look straight in
perspective, and not hogbacked or saggy, but they did not carry this into
designs on a flat surface.) Now once painters had proven that the eye
could be fooled, other thinkers began to wonder how....why didn't the eye
render an accurate image of a fake? Why did visual tricks work?

Meanwhile, Europeans were discovering that other cultures did not have
the same attitudes towards realism in art. Instead of realistic
perspective, they might indicate distance by putting the far objects
above the near ones--or to a specific side. They found themselves
puzzled by representations from other cultures sometimes (was this
creature supposed to be a deer or an antelope?)

The development of photography created a whole new set of questions.
Cultures familiar with realistic representational art quickly caught on
to the image produced by a camera, though many people did not recognize
themselves at first (they could tell it was a person.) But when
explorers first took cameras into "primitive" areas, to people who did
not use realistic representations of people in their art--whose art was
geometrical--these people did not recognize the flat image from a
photograph as "real" in any way. They could learn to do so (and did),
but at first or second glance, a human figure in a photograph looked to
them like a bunch of black, gray, and white blotches. (They didn't think
much of "realistic" painting, either...they saw it as bits of color
daubed on a flat surface.)

Unfortunately for cognitive scientists, "primitive" peoples all saw still
photographs before they saw movies (at least, I've never read of a case
where any people not familiar with photographs were shown movies
*first*.) My guess--and it's only a guess--is that they would have been
much more likely to recognize a moving picture as "real" than a still
one. Some stroke victims who have lost the ability to recognize faces in
repose can recognize family members when they *move*, even without seeing
their faces. There are obvious reasons why any animal might be more
likely to recognize characteristic movement (the rabbit hopping, the boss
mare swinging her head) than features in repose.

Anyway--the failure of humans with normal intelligence and intact
neurological systems to recognize unfamiliar forms of
representation shows that the connection between what you see and what
you get is learned, not innate. The tribesman who saw the photograph as
blotches of black, white, and gray--who vehemently denied that it was
himself or his wife--was quite right. It was *not* a person; it *was* a
bunch of blotches. Without the cultural training in that abstraction, he
saw it as the raw visual input. Humans with sensory processing problems
(like our son, for instance) may have enormous difficulties in
recognizing representations of real objects. When Michael was little, he
could not recognize anything in photographs (color or black and white),
most drawings, or on television. He was not blind; he could recognize
objects in real life (he could tell a sheep from a goat across a field),
but some of the clues he used in real life were not there in the
representation. To me, the dog on TV looked like a dog; to him it looked
like little colored dots wiggling around (he can now tell me this, though
at the time he couldn't.) Images on TV are actually little colored dots
wiggling around, as the raster moves across--he was seeing what was
really there--but that wasn't the useful level at which to see.

But his failure demonstrates something important about mammalian vision.
Mammalian visual processing systems all seem to require a period of
integration in infancy (whatever that is for the species) during which
the critter discovers what blotches go together to make what real things.
Humans who recover sight in adulthood after a blind childhood (there are
several known cases) usually do not recover *functional* sight: that
round white table changes, for them, every time they move around it, in a
dizzying whirl of images that never integrates into one consistent
object. In animal experiments, if the baby animal is not allowed visual
input during the critical period, it will not function visually later
even if no damage was done to the eyes.

This suggests that what is going on in visual processing--for all
mammals--is literally the conversion of abstractions (angles, edges,
color for the color-sensitive) into some kind of mental image. I
know--we usually think of a mental image as something we "see" in our
heads when it's not in front of us ("Visualize a leopard Appaloosa;
visualize Charisma and Mark Todd coming through the water at the Korean
Olympics...") But everything we *see* is also a mental
image--constructed from the pieces that are accepted by the lower
processing layers, and combined (in the case of humans) with a linguistic
label and conscious awareness. We take the lines, the blotches, the
little colored dots of printed pictures, or the moving dots of TV
pictures, and interpret them as representing real things. Most of the
time we don't even know we're doing this. We aren't thinking "This is an
abstraction"--we're thinking "Look at that horse run!"

Now for the dog and the television. The dog, like any mammal, spends
part of its puppyhood figuring out what blurs and blotches and lines and
edges and shadows mean what. It's not doing that consciously (or maybe
it is--but I make no claims that it is.) It's stumbling and fumbling
around, being a typical mammalian baby, and in the process it discovers
sight without thinking about it. A dog's not terribly visual, but it
does use its eyes, and it uses them, within the limits of their acuity,
just like any other mammal. Puppies, like babies, can be shown to have a
crude "understanding" of vertical perspective (if you put them on a safe
glass surface over clearly marked stairs downward, they act scared.)
They teeter on the edge of the porch, having fallen off once.

All this suggests strongly that what a dog sees is a construction of its
visual processing system...in other words, an abstraction. But this
doesn't mean it is capable of recognizing a representation of reality.
I've never had a dog show any interest in, or recognition of, a still
photo of a dog, or a dog-shaped toy or figurine. Nor have any of the
horses paid any attention to pictures of horses (beyond trying to nibble
them) or to toy horses. (Whereas young humans enjoy both accurate and
inaccurate toy horses, toy dogs, etc) But unlike some neurologically
damaged humans, who see TV images as little moving dots and not Rin Tin
Tin or Lassie, some dogs (at least) react to moving images of dogs as if
to real dogs. The collie I had as a kid reacted to dogs and cats (not
horses) on the TV screen--barking at the dogs, and lunging at the
cats--although we had a small black-and-white TV with poor reception.
Something in the movement triggered his species-specific response. My
son--who is quite able to think abstractly--would not have recognized
those wiggly dots as dogs or cats, or the other wiggly dots as peoples'
faces. The dog's ability to do so (demonstrated by his reaction)
indicates that he was capable of (unconscious) processing of an abstract
representation of limited scope.

So yes, I would say it is different for the Jack Russell Terrorist to
bark at the real squirrel (part of a reality it learned to interpret in
puppyhood) and then to bark at the squirrel on the TV screen. It is
certainly considered a major step when a neurologically damaged child
makes the connection between representation and reality...in fact, some
therapists argue that unless a child can make this connection, he cannot
be capable of abstract thought. (This is a whole other argument, and
that's not my position.)

Most animals, of course, have never been tested for either still or
moving images. So while we know that riders can learn from watching
videos of themselves and others, we don't know whether showing your horse
a video of what you want it to do would help or not. (This is a joke,
gang. I'm not seriously suggesting that you take your horse to the
movies. Although...it's an experiment that someone should try...would
horses "recognize" the flat-screen image as a horse? Or a human? Or a
particular human? Or a feed-bucket?)

There are some indications that horses have a bit harder time developing
object-permanence in their mental images than humans do: notice how a
horse alerts or shies when it sees a familiar object from an unusual
angle. If a horse is capable of "recognizing" a visual image at all, I
would expect that the best chance would be with profiles of moving horses
(as opposed to other animals--a social animal must recognize the body
language of its species) projected at near-life size. What good would it
do us to know whether horses can recognize horses on the silver screen?
Not much I can think of, except--if they did--it suggests that a horse
might be distracted if you rode it past a drive-in showing a western
movie's chase scene. Otherwise, this is all idle speculation.

I do think it's helpful to know that we're all (humans and horses) seeing
internal constructs which accord with reality because of the sensory
integration we did during infancy...because that suggests why it's
important for young horses to be out and about, and horses in training to
be given time and exposure to familiarize them with what they'll meet in
performance. It may even explain sudden weird behavior...spooking at the
familiar person who is sitting still instead of walking, panicking about
a feed tub hung on a fence-post, etc.

As for your horses knowing where to go, Jane...I haven't a clue, but it's
a lovely anecdote.

[Ye Olde St Francis the Talking Muleskinner]

jrw*********@********aracnet.com (Joyce Reynolds-Ward) wrote:

>ro...@your.innate.potentialities (Ye Olde Mean Vile & Evil Muleskinner) wrote:

>...

>>How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
>>what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
>>to anything managed by them as abstraction?
>>
>>Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
>>to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
>>and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
>>at the one on the television screen?

>Hmm.

>Gotta wonder, though, what my horses were thinking and/or seeing when
>I used to ride them over to the neighbor's house for a visit. The
>horses would stick their heads inside and watch adventure shows, and
>the clear favorite (judging from equine interest in TV watching rather
>than grazing) was "It Takes A Thief."

>Maybe they were all Robert Wagner fans?

They just hadn't seen "Mr Ed", yet.

>Of course, perhaps the old Sparkle mare was just absorbing new Houdini
>tricks--she *did* appear to improve her "magic knot untying lips and
>teeth" after a few sessions of "It Takes A Thief."

Good thing you never let her watch "Mission Impossible".

Did you know that the same guy who plays the DA on "Law
and Order" was the original leader of the IMF team,
before Peter Graves?

[Ye Olde Mean Vile & Evil Muleskinner]

Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> wrote:

>Jane H. Kilberg wrote:
>>
>> In article <omYi.18$kp.4...@news.sgi.net>, SheilaGreen@Freedom wrote:(E. Moon's stuff snipped)
>> > How do we know they're not just reacting directly to
>> > what they see, which remains 'real' to them, and not
>> > to anything managed by them as abstraction?
>> >
>> > Is it really any different for a Jack Russell Terrorist
>> > to come home from ratbiting in the (ob) stable all day,
>> > and bark at the squirrel outside the window the same as
>> > at the one on the television screen?
>>
>> Don't know Sheila but when my house was being built, the horses wondered in
>> and out. I moved in and left the door open while attending some of the
>> crews working. Three of the horses wondered in. They left their apples in
>> the bathroom. Now, how did they know where to take a shit! <SEG>

>Hi--my news server just started working again in a reasonable way (for

>two weeks it was loading maybe 4 rec.eq messages a day, and these were
>replies to things I never saw.) So--while I like to reply directly to
>people, I'm having to reply to a reply here.

Any reply from you is a good reply; may your ISP be more reliable.

>First a disclaimer--I don't claim to know what precisely any critter
>(human or animal or bird or fish) is "thinking" when it reacts to sensory
>input. This isn't so much scientific attitude as the fact that most
>times when people describe what they think is going on in *my* head,
>they're wrong. ("I know just how you feel," someone says. "Not likely,"
>I think, and usually I'm right.)

I feel like reading on.

Even if Jane'd never left the door open, they can still hear.

So recognition is learned in any case, in all dimensions, and
I still can't insist that any of it would be abstraction, as
opposed to association ...

Thank you, as ever, for your detailed and interesting articles.

[Richard Botterill]

>Elizabeth Moon <elizabe...@sff.net> wrote:
(lotsa stuff snipped...hope attributions are OK)

[...]

>> some dogs (at least) react to moving images of dogs as if
>>to real dogs. The collie I had as a kid reacted to dogs and cats (not
>>horses) on the TV screen--barking at the dogs, and lunging at the
>>cats--although we had a small black-and-white TV with poor reception.

Our first dog (Pekingese/Pomeranian cross) would do that, then rush to
the nearest window after the animal disappeared from the screen to see
if she could see where it had gone. I suspect in her mind the TV
screen was essentially just another "window."

>>Something in the movement triggered his species-specific response. My
>>son--who is quite able to think abstractly--would not have recognized
>>those wiggly dots as dogs or cats, or the other wiggly dots as peoples'
>>faces. The dog's ability to do so (demonstrated by his reaction)
>>indicates that he was capable of (unconscious) processing of an abstract
>>representation of limited scope.

Seems so.

[...]

>>There are some indications that horses have a bit harder time developing
>>object-permanence in their mental images than humans do: notice how a
>>horse alerts or shies when it sees a familiar object from an unusual
>>angle.

This begins to make sense of the fact that a horse that's gone quietly
past familiar jump standards many times when they're standing upright
may shy from the exact same standard if it's been tipped by horses
previously left loose in the arena and it is now lying on its side,
even if it's in virtually the same area of the arena that it was
before. <VBEG>

[...]

Richard and Sun Valley
Brandon, Manitoba, Canada
rbott...@zerospam.mb.ca

Spamblocked. Replace 'zerospam' with 'galaxy' to reply.