Okay, in this lecture we're gonna talk about why we need experiments. Why if you understand animal behavior, but specifically animal cognition, we have to have experiments? And the short version of that, the answer to that question is we need experiments because. Cognition is about the internal processes inside an animal's mind, including humans. The only way we can see inside the mind of an animal is to do experiments to see how they're actually thinking or how they're feeling when they're solving problems. So, for this lecture, the readings that'll be most helpful for you from The Genius of Dogs will be chapter one. And of course, all of Dognition is useful here because they're all the games that you play through Dognition are experiments. And you can see how experiments work, and how they're able to show you how your dog is thinking and also how they're not thinking. All right. Also, you can look at chapter three, because chapter three in The Genius Of Dogs, we talk about some basics of Experimental Design there as well. The Central Tenet of Experimental Psychology is really that all behavior can potentially be explained by multiple psychological mechanism. Just because behavior of two species or even two people look identical, it doesn't mean the behaviors are controlled by the same psychological or cognitive mechanism. Think about, when you shake somebody's hand. You're really happy to see somebody that you haven't seen in a while, or you're interested in meeting somebody new. Or you're just trying to be polite. All of those things can be different reasons why you're shaking someone's hand. So different people can have different psychological reasons for why they are doing what they're doing, even though the behavior of shaking the hand is the same. And then think of your dog. Some dogs can give a paw and they can shake hands. Do they have the same psychological mechanism underlying the shaking of a person's hand as when people shake hands? Are they excited to see you? Are they interested in meeting a new person? Or is it that they know that when they shake hands that you might scratch them, that they might get a nice social, or even food reward. So that's a great example showing that you can have a behavior that's very similar, shaking hands. And there could be different psychological mechanisms. The only way that we can tease those things apart, and figure out what is the mechanism driving shaking hands and dogs, or that individual versus another, is through experiments. Okay, so one of the things that we hear a lot about when we're studying animal behavior is anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is the idea that we see human traits in other animals and that when we see other animals behaving we tend to attribute to animals, and actually even objects, human traits. And so anthropomorphism often has been argued to be problematic when we're trying to understand animals because without experiments to test the different mechanisms for how animals are behaving, how do you know that an animal is solving a problem like a person is solving a problem? And anthropomorphism in the cognitive literature is usually discussed in association George Romanes. George Romanes was a student of Charles Darwin's, a contemporary, and he really answered the call of Charles Darwin after he wrote, The Origins of Species, And the Descent of Man. And Charles Darwin basically said that while most people before him had been arguing between a giant gap between other animals and humans cognitively, that animals and humans were on a continuum and that actually, the distance between animal intelligence and human intelligence was something that you could think about as being not as big, and potentially evolution can explain how you can get from animal intelligence to human intelligence. So George Romanes took that challenge on. He collected a number of stories about how animals saw problems from different experts and then just people that he had met and he collected it in the first book really on animal intelligence, called animal intelligence. But he actually is used now as an example of someone who may have been using anthropomorphism to a high degree because a lot of the stories were people reporting animals doing sophisticated things. Having human emotions, having human type, attributing types of intelligence when there were other explanations for the behaviors that people had observed. So just as a concrete example of anthropomorphism. This is in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire is the famous mountain. This is the old man of the mountain. And of course it's called the old man of the mountain because you see a human face. And, because this is such a distinctive face, it became a symbol for actually the state and was on their license plate. And really, when you look at this mountain, you can't help but see the profile of a human. And that is really anthropomorphism in a nut shell, is that we can't help but attribute or ascribe, human attributes, whether it's a human face to the side of a mountain or human psychology to a dog or another animal. But of course, the Old Man of the Mountain, when it still existed, it was just a collection of rocks. It was not, obviously, a human face, it was just chance that these set of rocks ended up looking like human. So, one of the reasons why we need experiments is to challenge our attribution of human traits to animals as explanations of their behavior, and to help us understand what their psychology really is and not just say that animals are little people, but really understand what are the different types of intelligence they really have.
