Is it possible to know what animals think

Additional tests by Hauser and other researchers reveal that monkeys can count up to four. The human ability to count to higher numbers apparently came only after we evolved language and developed words to describe quantities like 25 and 1, The bottleneck between human and nonhuman thinking involves not just words, but the ability to recombine words in an endless variety of new meanings. That appears to be a unique human capability. The next step in determining how much thinking ability humans share with other animals will involve scanning the brains of both while they do the same cognitive tasks.

Harvard psychologists have already begun to do this in a collaboration with researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Monkeys may exhibit the same kind of intellectual behavior as humans, but do they both use the same areas of the brain? So far, the monkeys are adapting well to experiments at the University of Massachusetts. They move into harnesses in brain scanning instruments, such as MRI machines, without difficulty.

Measurements of their stress levels show that after five days of training, marmoset monkeys feel as comfortable as they do in their home cages with their own social group. For some people, such research will not provide a satisfactory answer to the question: Do animals really think? These people define thinking as having a sense of self, beliefs that go beyond raw perceptions, emotions such as empathy, and the ability to imagine a situation remote in time and place and predict an outcome.

It is a mystery how elephants communicate over long distances. Safina spends a chapter relaying accounts of what looks like dolphin telepathy: knowing where a lost researcher wants to go and leading her there; rescuing lost dogs; acting oddly when, unknown to the humans, a human died in a boat while taking a nap; and performing a novel behavior after the trainer merely thought of the behavior.

Stories such as these abound, but science has no explanation for them yet. For science to move forward, Safina thinks that we should attend to anecdotes like these. Unfortunately, Safina expresses skepticism about the role that philosophy and comparative psychology can play in the progress of animal-mind sciences. One area that Safina discusses in great detail is theory-of-mind research, which investigates whether nonhuman animals understand what others think, see, and feel.

Safina claims that the theory of mind is seen widely in animals. He offers an anecdote about his two dogs making predictions about where to meet up with him when they are separated on a beach as evidence that they have a theory of mind.

The anecdote is interesting; it tells us that dogs can behave rationally in novel situations. But it doesn't tell us how dogs are able to solve that problem.

Did his dogs think about their human's beliefs and desires, or did they think about their human's typical behavior? In his discussion of the Premack and Woodruff study on chimpanzee theory of mind, he misrepresents the conclusions, suggesting that Sarah the chimpanzee did not solve the problems presented to her.

The subsequent debate was about how to create a task that could tease apart the possible mechanisms at operation; the scientific consensus about this study is that Sarah could have solved the task using associative processes rather than by thinking about the particular mental states of the actor in the videos.

We have animal cognitive psychology for the same reason we have human cognitive psychology: to find out how we work.

Just looking at babies, adult humans, elephants, or killer whales will not allow us to answer this how question. Furthermore, it is in theory-of-mind research that cognitive psychologists and philosophers are spending time in the field. Recent studies of the theory of mind in ravens and chimpanzees used clever tasks that take into account their ways of life, finding evidence that chimpanzees Karg et al.

This study shows how this has resulted in opening up promising research avenues to answer some of the most important research questions that currently face us. Established in , its members are 80 national funding bodies, research-performing agencies, academies and learned societies from 30 countries. Through its activities and influential membership the foundation has enabled cross-border cooperation in Europe and made major contributions to science globally. The ESF covers humanities, social sciences, life, earth and environmental sciences, medical sciences, physical and engineering sciences.

The scheme provides a flexible framework which allows national basic research funding and performing organisations to join forces to support excellent European research in and across all scientific areas. Until the end of , scientific coordination and networking was funded through the EC FP6 Programme, under contract no. As a result, there are no elements in the thoughts of animals that match our words and so there is no precise way to translate their thoughts into our sentences.

What is the correct translation of the Mona Lisa? Paintings are composed of colours on a canvas, not from words. But does the Mona Lisa really resist translation?

Likewise, the Mona Lisa depicts a smiling woman, not a collection of coloured pixels. My suggestion, then, is that trying to characterize animal thought is like trying to describe the Mona Lisa.

Approximations are possible, but precision is not. After all, even those animals, such as Sarah, who manage to laboriously learn rudimentary languages never grasp the rich recursive syntax that three-year-old humans effortlessly master.

Despite having considerable evidence that Sarah and other animals think, we are in the awkward position of being unable to say precisely what they think. Their thoughts are structured too differently from our language.