Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(84)

Once comparative psychologists began to appreciate that every species is special, and that learning is dictated by biology, they gradually began to enter the fold of evolutionary cognition. Their discipline greatly contributed to it through its long history of carefully controlled experiments and its many scientists with cognitive leanings. Even though these pioneers worked mostly under the radar and were forced to publish in second-tier journals, they described “higher mental processes” that they felt excluded learning.7 Given the absolute hegemony of behaviorism at the time, it made sense to define cognition in opposition to learning, but this always strikes me as a mistake. This dichotomy is as false as the one that pits nature against nurture. The reason we rarely talk about instincts anymore is that nothing is purely genetic: the environment always plays a role. In the same way, pure cognition is a figment of the imagination. Where would cognition be without learning? Some sort of information gathering is always part of it. Even K?hler’s apes, which heralded the study of animal cognition, had previous experience with boxes and sticks. Rather than looking at the cognitive revolution as a blow to learning theory, therefore, it is more like a marriage. The relationship has had its ups and downs, but in the end, learning theory will survive within the framework of evolutionary cognition. In fact, it will be an essential part of it.

The same holds for ethology. Its ideas about behavioral evolution are far from dead. They live on in many areas of science together with the ethological method. Systematic description and observation of behavior are at the core of all animal fieldwork as well as studies of child behavior, mother-infant interactions, nonverbal communication, and so on. The study of human emotions treats facial expressions as fixed action patterns while relying on the ethological method to measure them. For this reason, I don’t look at the current flowering of evolutionary cognition as a break with the past but rather as a moment in time when forces and approaches that have been around for a century or longer have won the upper hand. We finally have the breathing room to discuss the marvelous ways in which animals gather and organize information. And while the slayers of the cognitive view are a dying breed, we obviously still have the other two categories around—the skeptics and proponents—both of whom are essential. As a proponent myself, I do appreciate my more skeptical colleagues. They keep us on our toes and force us to design clever experiments to answer their questions. So long as progress is our shared goal, this is exactly how science ought to work.

Even though the study of animal cognition is often portrayed as an attempt to find out “what they think,” that is not really what it is all about. We’re not after private states and experiences, although it would be great if one day we could know more about them. For the moment, our goal is more modest: we wish to pinpoint proposed mental processes by measuring observable outcomes. In this sense, our field is no different from other scientific endeavors, from evolutionary biology to physics. Science always starts with a hypothesis, followed by the testing of its predictions. If animals plan ahead, they should retain tools that they will need later on. If they understand cause-effect relations, they should avoid the trap in the trap-tube the first time they encounter it. If they know what others know, they should vary their behavior depending on what they have seen others pay attention to. If they have political talents, they should treat the friends of their rivals with circumspection. Having discussed dozens of such predictions, and the experiments and observations they have inspired, the pattern of research is obvious. Generally, the more lines of evidence converge in support of a given mental faculty, the stronger it stands. If planning for the future is evident in everyday behavior, in tests with delayed tool use, as well as in untrained food caching and foraging choices, we are in pretty good shape to claim that at least some species have this capacity.

But still I often feel that we are too obsessed with the pinnacles of cognition, such as theory of mind, self-awareness, language, and so on, as if making grandiose claims about these is all that matters. It is time for our field to move away from interspecific bragging contests (my crows are smarter than your monkeys) and the black-and-white thinking it engenders. What if theory of mind rests not on one big capacity but on an entire set of smaller ones? What if self-awareness comes in gradations? Skeptics often urge us to break down larger mental concepts by asking what exactly we mean. If we mean less than we claim, they wonder why we don’t use a more reduced, down-to-earth description of the phenomenon.

I have to agree. We should start focusing on the processes behind higher capacities. They often rest on a wide range of cognitive mechanisms, some of which may be shared by many species, while others may be fairly restricted. We went through all this in the discussion of social reciprocity, which was initially conceived as animals remembering specific favors in order to repay them. Many scientists were unwilling to assume that monkeys, let alone rats, kept tabs on every social interaction. We now realize that this is not a requirement for tit-for-tat, and that not only animals, but also humans often exchange favors on a more basic, automated level related to long-term social ties. We help our buddies, and our buddies help us, but we aren’t necessarily counting.8 Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity.

We urgently need a bottom-up view that focuses on the building blocks of cognition.9 This approach will also need to include the emotions—a topic I have barely touched upon but that is close to my heart and is in equal need of attention. Breaking down mental capacities into all of these components may lead to less spectacular headlines, but our theories will be more realistic and informative as a result. It will also require a greater involvement of neuroscience. At the moment, its role is rather limited. Neuroscience may tell us where things happen in the brain, but this hardly helps us formulate new theories or design insightful tests. But while the most interesting work in evolutionary cognition is still mostly behavioral, I am sure this is going to change. Neuroscience has thus far only scratched the surface. In the coming decades, it will inevitably become less descriptive and more theoretically relevant to our discipline. In time, a book such as the present one will have a huge amount of neuroscience in it, explaining which brain mechanisms are responsible for the behavior observed.