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Several years ago I attended a distinguished lecture by a researcher with a long history of working with non-human primates. For an entire hour we watched clip
by SubiculumCode 8y ago
Several years ago I attended a distinguished lecture by a researcher with a long history of working with non-human primates. For an entire hour we watched clip after clip of chimps failing at trivially easy human mental tasks mostly involving 2nd order cognition, even after extensive training and guidance by researchers in each task, and videos of research data in which the researcher had anthropomorphized the observed anaimal behavior when the data doesn't actually support it He was trying to undermine the notion that humans are just a better chimpanzee (i.e. quantitative) but are a different order of chimpanzee (i.e. qualitatively different). I was convinced.
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoI'm not sure I have a good sense of what mental tasks require 2nd order cognition - what are some examples of the tasks that you saw?
- nyolfen 8y agothinking abstractly or indirectly — thinking about thinking
- SubiculumCode 8y agoThanks. That is exactly what I meant. I was busy writing up some research today and didn't make my way back here to answer.
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoI'm still curious how you'd design a task that requires "thinking about thinking" and give it to chimpanzees, given that they don't have language. It's a useful restatement, but do you have an example you could share please?
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoThat's, uhh, a restatement of the concept, not an example of a task that requires the concept.