How to make smoke without fire. Minds are not (just) trainable machines
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COMMENTARY
How to make smoke without fire. Minds are not (just) trainable machines Claudia Fugazza 1 & Ádám Miklósi 1,2 Accepted: 14 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Wynne (2020) recently published a commentary to our work reporting how a dog categorized objects in the absence of specific training (Fugazza & Miklósi, 2020). We are grateful to Wynne for the historic overview on the study of spontaneous behavior. However, he does not provide a clear definition for the term spontaneous. Here we refer to a possible definition from the Cambridge Dictionary: “spontaneous – adjective - (not planned) happening or done in a natural, often sudden way, without any planning or without being forced.” This adjective perfectly describes the experience Whisky, our study subject, received in her human family. Whisky’s learning of categories was not planned (the owners never aimed to teach to categorize) and her performance in the test was sudden in the sense that it had never been explicitly exercised before. We point out that this is also how most family dogs (as well as human children) are exposed to the stimuli in their environment. Except for the case of dogs trained for some specific purposes, typically there is no premeditation in the way dog owners provide toys to their dogs or the way they play with them. Similarly, there is no specific premeditation in the way children play with their parents and peers. Owners (and parents) do not aim to teach their dogs (and their children) to categorize objects based on a predetermined rule – e.g., their odor. The natural experience that dogs (and children) gain by living in their natural environment provides the basis for the way they spontaneously form mental categories of the objects. This is very different from what was done in previous categorization studies, where the subjects were first extensively trained to categorize objects
* Claudia Fugazza [email protected] 1
Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
2
MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary
based on a specific rule that was pre-established by the Experimenters and, once they reached a predetermined criterion of success, they were tested (see, e.g., Range et al., 2008, for a typical study on dogs). Quoting from the text of our paper: “Compared to laboratory animals, Whisky’s experience is more similar to the experience of human infants living in a family and being naturally exposed to objects, their names and their categories. This allowed us to investigate the mental categories spontaneously formed by the dog during her daily life in a human family and to shed some light on the different features (or combinations of those) used to spontaneously categorize objects.” In his commentary, Wynne (2020) confuses “training” and “experience” in the absence of any clear definition. We point out that there is an important difference between training and exposure in a natural context. While training implies deliberate practice with the planned aim of r
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