Sticks and stones: Associative learning alone?
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Sticks and stones: Associative learning alone? Jennifer Vonk 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Summary Gruber et al. (Current Biology, 29, 686–692, 2019) report that New Caledonian crows engage in mental representation to solve a problem involving a tool. Although the crows’ success is impressive, an associative account of their behavior calls into question the extent to which the data reflect representation of future states. Keywords Crows . Tool-use . Planning . Associative
Gruber et al. (2019) report that crows are able to correctly anticipate future steps in a problem-solving sequence involving tools, even when each stage of the problem was out of view. They argue that the results indicate that crows can plan. Despite the fact that planning abilities are telling of important cognitive capacities such as metarepresentation, representation of the future, cognitive regulation, etc., the topic has not been well studied within comparative cognition. Like many other exciting topics of study, the study of planning suffers from the challenge that it is difficult to tease apart an associative account whereby animals have learned that particular responses or objects are associated with future rewards and an account by which they can represent actions that might be useful in the future contingent upon circumstances they have not yet experienced. As Hampton (2018) suggested, that animals predict and choose current behaviors in anticipation of future rewards should not be surprising. It is more interesting to determine if they plan flexibly such that they work to procure specific tools only under circumstances where that future tool would be useful and not when it would not be. Seed and Dickerson (2016) also acknowledged that it is crucial for animals to anticipate future outcomes that differ from events that have occurred in their past in order for researchers to confidently determine that they represent future states. In Gruber and colleagues’ study, the crows have experienced all of the outcomes prior to each test, so it is challenging to determine whether they are reasoning about future versus past states.
* Jennifer Vonk [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA
Most readers will likely be fatigued by yet another diatribe on the importance of distinguishing between “associative” and “cognitive” accounts of apparently complex behaviors, and to some degree, this may be a false dichotomy. But a serious problem persists in comparative psychology, with researchers continuing to over-interpret interesting patterns of behavior. In doing so, they often minimize the significance of the actual behavior because readers are distracted by the human-like trait the study is intending to reveal and neglect to ask (and answer) deeper questions about what the behavior actually reveals about nonhuman cognition. Researchers would be better served by focusing on the exact cognitive processes underlying apparently complex behavior in other species, rather than by trying to find w
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