Mind Links

Ape Consciousness–Human Consciousness: A Perspective Informed by Language and Culture, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, William Mintz Fields and Jared Taglialatela, Integrative and Comparative Biology, vol. 40, no. 6, pg. 910.

Synopsis: Animal consciousness has long been assumed to be a nonviable arena of investigation. At best, it was thought that any indications of such consciousness, should it exist, would not be interpretable by our species. Recent work in the field of language competencies with bonobos has laid this conception open to serious challenge. This paper reviews this work and the case it makes for our impending capacity to tap the consciousness of a uniquely enculturated group of bonobos who are capable of comprehending human speech and employing a lexical communication system.

From concluding discussion:

Regarding the concept of "degree of consciousness" as stated, we reject this notion. We believe that the metaphors of bending and folding that we have applied to consciousness are a process that the neural substrate performs in the creation of reality. We reiterate our introductory remark, culture controls the typology of the neural substrate and therefore we believe culture is driving speciation. If we are correct, the brain of a nonhuman primate like Kanzi, reared in a Pan/Homo culture, capable of understanding spoken English and uttering lexical English counterparts, should possess a brain which is morphologically different than a brain of a feral bonobo or a bonobo reared without human language, culture and tools.

Link to study: http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/40/6/910

Slide showing one of the experiments:

http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/40/6/910/I00031569040060910F01

Chimpanzees know what others know, but not what they believe Juliane Kaminski *, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello Cognition 109 (2008) 224–234

a b s t r a c t: There is currently much controversy about which, if any, mental states chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates understand. In the current two studies we tested both chimpanzees’ and human children’s understanding of both knowledge–ignorance and false belief – in the same experimental paradigm involving competition with a conspecific. We found that whereas 6-year-old children understood both of these mental states, chimpanzees understood knowledge–ignorance but not false belief. After ruling out various alternative explanations of these and related findings, we conclude that in at least some situations chimpanzees know what others know. Possible explanations for their failure in the highly similar false belief task are discussed.

.. .

4. General discussion

The current findings provide evidence that chimpanzees understand when others are knowledgeable and ignorant – in the sense of what those others have and have not seen in the immediate past – at least in some situations. In both Study 1 and Study 2 we found that chimpanzees (and human children and adults) preferentially selected a piece of reward that their competitors had not seen being hidden over one he had seen being hidden. The previous studies of Hare et al. (2000, 2001) had a number of different control conditions that ruled out very low level explanations of the chimpanzees’ behavior in the basic competitive paradigm. But the behavioral rule as manifest in the new evil eye hypothesis – that chimpanzees would avoid food that another had directed her behavior to at its current location – was still a possibility. The current Study 1 eliminated this possibility by showing that under certain conditions they do not do this. It is of course possible that some other behavior reading explanation (Povinelli & Vonk, 2003; Povinelli & Vonk, 2004), could be devised to explain the results of both previous and current results, but the diversity of findings makes this extremely unlikely. Study 2 found that in the same experiment in which they discriminated knowledge and ignorance in their competitor, chimpanzees did not distinguish their competitor’s true belief from his false belief. If the experimenter tricked the competitor by moving the high-quality piece of reward (and the subject saw this), the subject gained no further advantage over the case in which the competitor simply did not see the hiding at all. In contrast, 6-year-old children did gain an additional advantage when they saw that the competitor had a false belief over the case in which he was simply ignorant. This finding is consistent with the experiment of Call and Tomasello (1999), who also found that children, unlike chimpanzees and orangutans, provided positive evidence of false belief attribution in a cooperative experimental paradigm. Moreover, our current chimpanzee results are consistent with the data of Hare et al. (2001) in a competitive situation in which chimpanzees once again provided evidence consistent with the knowledge–ignorance distinction but not with false belief attribution. In that study, chimpanzees behaved in the same way regardless of whether their competitor was uninformed (knowledge–ignorance) or misinformed (false belief) about the location of the reward.

Link to study: http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/pdf/Kaminski_Cog_08.pdf

Priming study--masked words have unconscious effect: http://www.casra.ch/teaching/2002/cns/doc/Dehaene_et_al_1998.pdf

Handing subjects a warm cup of coffee elicits positive and unconscious effects: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19732385

http://io9.com/5647277/how-to-build-a-brain-with-neural-networks

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/57545/Artificial_Neural_Networks?taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=1