Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Dogs know when they don't know
In the field of comparative psychology, researchers study animals in order to learn about the evolution of various traits and what this can tell us about ourselves. At the DogStudies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, project leader Juliane Bräuer studies dogs to make these comparisons. In a recent study published in the journal Learning & Behavior, Bräuer and colleague Julia Belger, now of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, explore whether dogs have metacognitive abilities -- sometimes described as the ability to "know what one knows" -- and in particular whether they are aware of what information they have learned and whether they need more information.
To test this, the researchers designed an apparatus involving two V-shaped fences. A reward, either food or a toy, would be placed by one researcher behind one of the two fences while another researcher held the dog. In some cases, the dog could see where the reward was placed, while in others the dog could not. The researchers then analyzed how frequently the dogs looked through a gap in the fence before choosing an option. The question was whether, like chimps and humans, the dog would "check" through the gap when he or she had not seen where the reward was placed. This would indicate that the dog was aware that he or she did not know where the reward was -- a metacognitive ability -- and would try to get more information before choosing a fence.
(Score: 0, Troll) by jimbrooking on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:32AM (4 children)
I wonder if Trump would pass the test....
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by captain normal on Thursday November 22 2018, @05:10AM (3 children)
Do you really think he is as smart as a dog?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 22 2018, @05:33AM
Not.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Blymie on Thursday November 22 2018, @07:49AM (1 child)
I'm sure Trump is actually fairly intelligent. Thing is, *how* is he intelligent?
I'd say likely there's a massive problem with impulse control, and logical deduction as a likely. I think a lot of the time, he just doesn't give a fuck... and I'm not saying that's a good thing in a President heh.
But on the other side of the coin, a lot of what he does is 'playing to the crowd'. He doesn't care what someone that won't ever ever vote for him thinks, he wants to play to those that *might* vote for him.
So couple those two things together.. and he can certainly seem very unintelligent if your world view doesn't agree with his.
And the "not give a fuck" thing, as in .. not paying attention to advisors, ignoring information, that sort of thing -- that's... scary.
But I firmly believe "know your enemy" or even your "foe" if not enemy. So don't underestimate. Try to figure out the real chinks in the armour, not just "stupid" and such.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:39PM
Armour? Huh! More like a thick rind.
Sorry pal I'll continue to treat him the way he worth, that is ignore him
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:38AM (4 children)
That is why instinct is a razor-sharp double-edged sword across all species. It's why your dog walks you, rather than you walking him or her. It's why your kid asks you all those tough questions you aren't ready to answer. It's why, when you meet Jamal in some dark street-corner, you know when to run when you sense 5 minutes before that the dope deal's gonna go bad.
This is why we need to take Carl Jung seriously instead of dismissing him as a crackpot. When the evil in this world is non-stop appeals to your cerebrum, sometimes you have to listen to your cerebellum.
(Score: 1) by hopdevil on Thursday November 22 2018, @03:18AM (2 children)
I'm not sure I follow your logic
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @03:36AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @10:29AM
The real question is, could a dog follow his logic?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:41PM
Sorry, can't do. Not without appreciable quantities of alcohol, as you well know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Thursday November 22 2018, @06:02AM (3 children)
100% of the cats subjected to the same experiment would not budge until food is placed directly in front of them...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday November 22 2018, @11:31AM (2 children)
Pretty much.
Cats weren't stupid enough to need to take part in the same experiment.
I can't imagine that my cat wouldn't solve this problem similarly or even in a better way (ignore both because "you're just pissing me about now and I have fences to sit on").
I find dogs incredibly dumb subservient animals. At least a cat has some attitude and life in it. I'm pretty sure it'd pass all the same tests as a dog if it could be bothered, but it's a victim of apathy not stupidity.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:44PM
FTFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @10:21PM
You've never met our dog, then again, she was brought up surrounded by a tribe of cats..
We've an alpha female cat in our tribe, but, amusingly, the dog is now apparently next in line. The alpha female doesn't defer to her, but the other cats do and as she has also figured out that humans only exist to serve the furry little feline overlords, and that now she has been officially 'adopted' into the feline hierarchy, she demands equal treatment.
Her brother, daft bugger that he is, belongs to a cat-less relative, and we look after him quite a lot when the relative is away. It's amazing how 'cat like' his attitude to the rest of the universe has become over the years, again, thanks to the influence of our feline tribe. It's fun watching a large (mostly) Labrador cross and the cats chase a laser pointer dot around the room...total bloody chaos, but fun, the thing about this is that while the cats will happily pounce on the little red dot when it magically appears, he knows when the game is about to begin the second I pick up the laser pointer (admittedly, we had a tomcat many years ago who, after studying the laser pointer game for a couple of minutes, rather than chase the dot, he launched an all-out attack on the hand wielding the pointer...a truly calculating cat.)
As you might have guessed, a mainly cat person here, but we have had a number of dogs as well over the years, the words dumb and subservient have never applied to any of them. I might have just given you subservient, but they've only been so in the narrow sense that they knew where they fitted in as far as the household 'pack' was concerned.
Leaving our lot aside, there was the dog that one of my uncles had back in the 70's, she only ever would allow three people to clap her, my uncle and my father and mother, the fun part was that she tolerated my cousins, her other nominal 'pack' members, and would quite happily defend the pram containing the oldest daughter's new born son against all strangers (which led to an amusing incident involving a priest visiting my aunt..my father joked about the dog being Voltaire reincarnated), but she would never obey any of my cousins. She wasn't feral, but when she went wandering, her home range was something like 2 mi², territorial range 10 mi², the local dog catcher never managed to get her once in her 10+ years on the planet, not for want of trying, but as she was both very smart and a cross greyhound, he was at a major disadvantage.
So dogs, yes, I've seen the slobbering idiot dogs who fawn on their master's every command, but I've owned terriers who could teach master-classes on craftiness to foxes, and I've also seen (and petted) the Chihuahua who 'ran' with the feral cats from the colony in the builders merchant's yard in south London¹ back in the mid 90's (By day, someone's lap dog, by night, the fugliest counterfeit cat in the whole of the Tooting/Collier's Wood badlands...)
¹No longer there, from Google Maps it's now a Lidl and the obligatory ubiquitous shitty high density housing, ah well, sic transit gloria mundi..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aristarchus on Thursday November 22 2018, @09:53AM (1 child)
There is a section on this, in Plato's Republic, where it is suggested that dogs that can distinguish between friend and foe are in fact philosophers because of the. Let me find the original text:
Plato, Republic, [partiallyexaminedlife.com], (Why, oh why, cannot these hipster websites link to the proper Stepanus pages in the original Greek?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @11:34AM
That is, shall we say, not the finest part of the text. Should we really all strive to bare our teeth at every unknown situation and keep barking loudly until it goes away? Although it is an accurate condition of the average human condition, I disagree that it is something to aspire to.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:42PM (2 children)
As usual the social scientists jump to conclusions (TLDR the article though). A more simple explanation would be that when the dogs see the food they go after it. You might call that classic conditioning. When they do not see anything they would start exploring, no need to appeal to metacognition. This would be similar to a bacterium going after a chemical gradient when it exists and pursuing a random walk otherwise. But they go after the fence, you say, but that would be just the area that they cannot see and want to explore.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday November 22 2018, @01:56PM
Not matter how shrewd, your sheep mind can't step into the shoes of a dog.
Have you forgotten the dogs' smell sense? They know where the food is with enough certainty, it's just that they decided to give some satisfaction to the researcher in the hope of a longer experiment thus more food.
(grin. A sheep's one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday November 23 2018, @04:28AM
Pro dog trainer here. Hunting dogs do this kind of thing all the time. Retrievers in particular tend to be good at it. An experienced dog will use a variety of techniques to find a lost bird, including eliminating ground already searched and returning to the start point to get re-oriented (yes, some can tell when they've gotten turned around and need to get their bearings, and will act on it on their own). People who've only had relatively-untrained pets really do not understand what a good dog is capable of, then are amazed by research that demonstrates a level of "hunt" I'd expect from a six week old puppy.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:23PM (2 children)
Dogs are exactly what you get when you select an animal for tens of thousands of years to amplify personnality traits that humans find preferable:
They are stupid. They are noisy. They are totally subservient. They are genetically compeled to love you absolutely and unconditionnaly even if you're the most digusting piece of shit in the universe and you treat them like dirt.
Exactly what the typical human being would look for in a companion.
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Thursday November 22 2018, @06:22PM
Allow me to introduce you to Airdales. None of the above is true. Interesting dogs, but I'd never have another one. I prefer my cats to be cat sized, at least then I can pick them up when they're being uncooperative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @01:56PM
No, sorry, they are not. They have a heirarchical map in their heads of their 'pack', there will be both an alpha male and alpha female slot in that map that the dog will either 'inhabit' or defer to, how the dog reacts to anyone else in the pack 'map', depends on the dogs view of the relative positions in the hierarchy.
Anyone not in the 'pack', then the dog will react to you as it sees fit, if it chooses to obey you once or twice, you cannot assume it's because it sees you as it's lord and master, there's a degree of testing involved in dog - human interactions, they're very good at figuring out how well disposed 'strangers' are to them, and, by extension, their pack (which is why they'll rapidly lose any interest in you once they figure out you're not a threat...or have food...or are food ) despite this, unfortunately your point
is true in a lot of cases, that's thanks to these shitheads firmly establishing their alpha pack position in the poor dog's mind early on, no matter how friendly you are to such an abused dog, they'll still go running to the shitheads that abuse them when they see or smell them, from bitter experience of a couple of rescued dogs, it can take years to break this conditioning.(Of course, there is a simple method, that is to beat the fucking crap out of the current 'alpha' thereby becoming the new 'alpha' in the abused dog's map, satisfying as this is, unfortunately the poor dog feels duty bound by pack loyalty to come to the defence of these fuckers..)
Btw, I'm mainly a cat person (and have several decades worth of scars to prove it), but have been around dogs all my life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @02:36PM (1 child)
srsly? "he" or "she"? what about that word "dog"? this is too masculine; a gender profile against females.
she dogs should be called "dogesess"!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @10:15PM
No, the term is "bitches", just like female hyenas and afro-americans.