Animal Cognition and Communication
As usual, read this blog, do the Fitch reading, and then take the quiz on Top Hat to test your understanding.
This week’s main reading, Chapter 4 of Fitch (2010) (pages 143-202), surveys the various cognitive abilities and communication systems on offer in the animal world (available online via DiscoverEd). In particular, Fitch discusses experimental evidence, and how the differences and similarities between humans and other animals can shed light on the evolution of language.
NB. Fitch refers several times to Mitteilungsbedurfnis, which is defined in Chapter 3, which you haven’t been asked to read but which I talked about in class. This is a German word referring to the tendency to share our thoughts and feelings with others
Fitch begins with a whirlwind tour of cognitive abilities in animals, such as memory, planning and inference, before moving on to discuss tool use, social intelligence, and animal culture. The general conclusion is that nonhuman animals demonstrate an impressive array of complex cognitive abilities. This has two important implications. First, much of this sophisticated cognition is possible in the absence of language. Second, many capabilities which were previously thought to be uniquely human, such as the use and manufacture of tools, have since been found in nonhuman animals.
The clip below shows a chimpanzee using stone tools to crack open nuts, demonstrating fine motor control and planning:
These impressive abilities are not only found in species which are closely related to humans. The second clip shows problem solving by a crow: crows are able to use their impressive capacities for memory, planning, innovation and reasoning to complete the task of retrieving an item of food.
Humans and other animals are also flexible vocal learners. One of the most entertaining examples is the Lyrebird, which is hilariously brilliant at mimicking the sounds in their environment:
In contrast to the rich internal cognitive world of animals, Fitch argues that their communication systems are relatively impoverished when compared to what we can do with language. Still, even though we know of no other animal with language-like abilities, the communication systems we observe show a great degree of variety in their richness and complexity. For instance, the bengalese finch is capable of producing song with relatively elaborate structures, but which is restricted in its function and lacks propositional content:
Vervet monkeys use three distinct alarm calls to refer to different predators (see video below). In fact alarm calling systems that work like this are fairly common in the natural world - vervets were the first species for which this was conclusively demonstrated (using an ingenious playback method, where experimenters played them recordings of alarm calls in the absence of predators and watched how they responded), which is why everyone uses them as an example, but they are by no means unique (for instance, chickens have a aerial vs terrestrial predator alarm calling system).
We also find amazing communicative abilities in some rather surprising organisms. Consider the waggle dance of the honeybee and its ability to convey information about something not currently present (aka displacement, one of Hockett’s design features of language:
Kanzi, a bonobo (one of two extant species of chimpanzee, the other being the better-known common chimpanzee) raised in captivity, has mastered a large number of arbitrary symbols and can match these symbols with real-world referents:
Kanzi’s use of arbitrary symbols is just one of his many abilities that are beyond anything we observe in wild bonobos and highlights how different environments can unmask latent cognitive abilities. Like some of the other animals in this section, Kanzi’s impressive knowledge of vocabulary hints at abilities which are necessary pre-conditions for mastery of language. But Fitch considers language to be fundamentally distinct in two aspects.
First, human language is highly expressive: it allows us to convey practically any thought that pops into our heads and converse on a range of topics that dwarfs anything we’ve witnessed in nonhuman animals. Indeed, animal communication appears to be tailored for very specific needs, such as predator warnings and mating. Second, nonhuman animals are capable of some pretty impressive feats of observing and interpreting the behaviour of others, but they lack the ability to fulfil the second half of what Fitch terms the Gricean contract: to use this knowledge about behaviour to intentionally inform other individuals (although some more recent evidence, which I will discuss in the lecture, challenges this).
To wrap up the chapter, Fitch considers why humans are unique in these two respects. The central point is that there are considerable evolutionary barriers to achieving a cheap and honest communication system like language. One of the goals in studying the evolution of language is to try and investigate the circumstances under which humans overcame these limitations.
In addition to these general conclusions, there are three points Fitch raises that you should keep in mind when reading:
Be cautious when interpreting animal behaviour: You will see many instances in the chapter where human researchers have over-interpreted or indeed under-interpreted the capacities of nonhuman animals.
Evolution is not goal-directed: Evolution is a blind process that does not have any particular goals in mind. So, when thinking about animal cognition and communication, there is nothing to say that evolution is working toward increasingly complex behaviours (or increasingly human behaviours). As Fitch notes, there is considerable evidence that counters the view of an evolutionary ladder, with organisms forming a linear progression from least to most complex.
Descent and Convergence: The comparative method is a useful tool for elucidating cases of homology and analogy in cognitive and communicative abilities. Employing this method can tell us what features we share with other species because they were present in our last common ancestor (homology, or similarity through descent from a common ancestor) and under what environmental conditions do certain features evolve (analogies, produced by convergent evolution).
Fitch, W. T. (2010). The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.