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posted by on Friday December 02 2016, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the smart-is-as-smart-does dept.

The fact that animals can use tools, have self-control and certain expectations of life can be explained with the help of a new learning model for animal behaviour. Researchers at Stockholm University and Brooklyn College have combined knowledge from the fields of artificial intelligence, ethology and the psychology of learning to solve several problems concerning the behaviour and intelligence of animals.

Animals are often very effective; an oystercatcher opens mussels quickly, a baboon takes every opportunity to steal food from tourists or a rat navigates with ease between the bins in a park. Previously these behaviours have been considered to be inherited instincts, even though it is well known that animals have great learning abilities. Researchers from Stockholm University and Brooklyn College have now created an associative learning model that explains how effective behaviours can arise. This means that an animal does not only learn that the last step of a behaviour chain, the one that is rewarding, is valuable. An animal can learn that all steps towards the reward are valuable.

"Our learning model may also explain how advanced behaviours are created at an individual level. Behaviours like self-control, chimpanzee tool use as well as other phenomena like animals having certain expectations of live", says Magnus Enquist, professor of ethology at Stockholm University. "Similar models are used in the field of artificial intelligence, but they have been ignored in animal studies."

Since the 1970s it has been known that animals weigh the cost of a certain behaviour against the profit and that they, to a high degree, make optimal decisions, which is assumed to be genetically determined. The research group's new model deals not only with learning, it also takes into account the idea that what animals are able to learn can be genetically regulated.

Stop. Teaching. The. Animals. Skills.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:45AM (#435788)

    Really they don't compare the performance of their model with any other reinforcment learning models. Thurstone's is just one of the earliest, the simplest to conceive, and they don't even mention him.