₦airaland Forum

Emary: I googled "Do animals think research" and got all these. The consensus is that animals think but they are still trying to determine the level of meta cognition. Some of them even think about thinking. Some believe that they think like autistic children who do not apply their senses in the "normal" way we do. Also, the Bible tells me in the story of Balaam (Numbers 22:21-35) that the donkey he was riding could think and sensed the presence of the angel before he did. God only opened her mouth. He also showed that He loves animals because he told Balaam that if she had not turned him away, He would have killed him but spared her(Vs. 32). I don't need anymore conviction than that.

http://www.livescience.com/5712-animals-thinking-research-suggests.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/03.14/01-thinking.html
http://cqresearcherblog..com/2010/10/do-animals-think.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/dec/18/hunting.animalwelfare
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/may/what-do-animals-think
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-what-is-your-dog-thinking
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text

same thang i got. There was no definite assertion tho

Even computers can learn. They can be programmed to learn

all4naija: Let's call it 'survival instincts' by connotation. I think it can easily pass for instincts than anything else.

Okay Boss

all4naija: Doesn't this research prove beyond reasonable doubt that animals don't think? Should what have been explained what you are passing for thinking. Jeez! You have to comprehend the argument to prove if animals really think not by exercising metacognition (which in the real sense is different from thinking).Metacognition is just a surviving tool. Every animal has brain and exercise it in one way or the other but for thinking it's only humans who do that.

The research is clear that animals don't think!

its not instinct either. Unless there's another word for it. Also look up http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-what-is-your-dog-thinking and http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text

all4naija: In other words, behavior is different from thinking - that's what is explained in your link. So, animals are doing things on their natural way based on instincts(even if they are thought they act accordingly but they can not reason - what would pass for thinking). You are missing instincts with thinking ability!

[quote author=http://www.livescience.com/5712-animals-thinking-research-suggests.html]Some animals are more thoughtful than others, according to a comparative psychologist who says evidence is mounting that dolphins, macaque monkeys and other animals share our ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.
J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo notes that humans are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thinking ."Humans can feel uncertainty. They know when they do not know or remember, and they respond well to uncertainty by deferring response and seeking information," Smith writes in the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
And accumulating research, he says, suggests metacognition is not unique to humans.
"The idea is that some minds have a cognitive executive that can look in on the human's or the animal's thoughts and problem-solving and look at howits going and see if there are ways to guide it or if behavior needs to pause while more information is obtained," Smith told LiveScience.
Robert Hampton, assistant professor of psychology at EmoryUniversity in Georgia, who studies neuroscience and animal behavior, agrees that some animals show metacognition.
"Work with primates has shown many parallels with human metacognitive performance," said Hampton, who was not involved in the current review study. "In particular, some of the studies done by Dr. Smith and colleagues have shown close correspondence between the performance of humans and monkeys in nearly identical metacognitive tests."
Thoughtful tests
Testing metacognition in humans is a relative walk in the park, as we can verbalize our feelings of knowing or not knowing. But animals can show off their mental skills without words. For instance, scientists give animals difficult perceptual tasks, such as deciding whether a box on a screen contained thousands of dots or just a few. The animals also have an out: They can decline the trial and avoid a penalty for a wrong response.
The original experiment showingsuch mental abilities in a non-human animal involved the dolphin Natua. "When uncertain, the dolphin clearly hesitated and wavered between his two possible responses," Smith said."But when certain, he swam toward his chosen response so fast that his bow wave would soak the researchers' electronic switches."
"The opposite would be they justreact to the world," Smith said. That's exactly what studies on pigeons have shown. When in doubt, the birds just plow ahead,it seems.
Several converging studies now show that capuchin monkeys barely express the cognitive ability that dolphins have expressed, though similar studies of macaque monkeys suggests these primates do thinkabout thinking.
Smith said perhaps certain branches in the primate order developed metacognitive abilitieswhile others didn't. Another idea is that the relatively big-brained animals, like dolphins, evolved this capacity.
So even if lowly pigeons don't boast the mental prowess, crowsmight, he figures. "It would be great to see if the ultimate in birdbrains have this capacity as well,"Smith said. Other research finds crows to be amazingly smart and adept at tool use .
Self-awareness
And while metacognition can involve self-awareness, the "I" part of the equation isn't a necessary ingredient, Smith said. Scientists are not sure if other animals possess self-awareness .
Hampton gives two examples to illustrate metacognition with andwithout self-awareness. If a psychologist is asked if she can answer a five-year-old's psychology question, she will answer yes, reasoning that she isan expert and that a 5-year-old can't have too difficult of a question. "This is likely to be correct, and thus the psychologist has correctly predicted her cognitive performance. However, she did not need to introspect in any significant way to do this," Hampton said.
Say that same psychologist is asked if she'll remember the neighbor's name when he comesover for a party. When she tries to recall the name, she comes up with "Dave," the correct name. Soshe would answer "yes."
"Again, this metacognitive prediction of cognitive performance is likely correct. But note here that the psychologist isthe only one in a position to know with confidence whether she can remember the name," Hampton said. "No one else couldpredict her performance as well as she could, contrasting with the other example. This second case of metacognition is much more likely to involve self-awareness or consciousness."
Further research is needed to tease out any self-awareness in animals, Smith said[/quote]

all4naija: That's a good one. Now,do you think animals think by looking at this definition?

it says behavior is instinct in the absence of previous learning. Am i missing something here?

[quote author=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct]Any behavior is instinctive if it is performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning ), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors. Sea turtles , newly hatched on a beach, will automatically move toward the ocean. A joey climbs into its mother's pouch upon being born. Honeybees communicate by dancing in the direction of a food source without formal instruction.Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and the building of nests . All of these are examples of complex behaviors and are thus substantially different from simple reflex behaviors.
An instinct should be distinguished from a reflex, whichis a simple response of an organism to a specific stimulus, such as the contraction of the pupil in response to bright light or the spasmodic movement of the lower leg when the knee is tapped. Instincts, in contrast, are inborn complex patterns of behavior that must exist in every member of the species and that cannot be overcome by force of will. However, the absence of volitional capacity must not be confused with an inability to modify fixed action patterns. For example, people may be able to modify a stimulated fixed action pattern by consciously recognizing the point of its activation and simply stop doing it, whereas animals without a sufficiently strong volitional capacity may not be able to disengage from their fixed action patterns, once activated.
Commonly cited examples of presumed instincts in humans arethe "maternal instinct" and the"survival instinct". These exampleshowever do not conform to the scientific definition of instinct. Many human females do not desire children and furthermore some mothers kill their own children. Similarly, many humans contradict their own survival through suicide.
The role of instincts in determining the behavior of animals varies from species to species. The more complex the neural system of an animal, the greater is the role of the cerebral cortex, and social learning and instincts play a lesser role. A comparison between a crocodile and an elephant illustrates how mammals for example are heavily dependent on social learning. Lionesses and chimpanzees raised in zoos away from their birth mothers most often reject their own offspring because they have not been taught the skills of mothering. Such is not the case with simpler species such as reptiles.[/quote]