> How would we determine whether an animal understands something? Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby is full of remarkable experiments to determine what ba

> How would we determine whether an animal understands something? Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby is full of remarkable experiments to determine what babies understand. (At least, I assume it is! I haven't read it - just saw her give a talk about the book and her research when the book came out, and she talked about lots of different experiments.) Stuff like showing babies white and black balls going in a container, then when one is picked out, the babies look longer at it if they're surprised, if it's an unlikely event. They have much better models of probability younger than anyone thought. Or they show them animations of dots shaped like Momma dot and baby dot, and see how the babies react when various things happen to the baby dot.. Totally ingenious. A lot of them, or something similar, could be done with animals; I wonder how much has.