learning
The Thoughtful Animal
Tag archives for learning
Monday Pets: Cold Blooded Cognition
Posted by Jason G. Goldman on June 28, 2010 She: “What are you writing about?” Me: “Cognition in cold-blooded animals.” She: “Hot.” Most people who study cognition focus on mammals or birds. But I hope I’ve convinced you that other animals are important to investigate as well. One research group at the University of Vienna likes cold-blooded critters. Turtles and lizards and such. They…
How Do You Figure Out How Chimps Learn? Peanuts.
Posted by Jason G. Goldman on May 12, 2010 What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning. There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn.…
Monday Pets: How Do Dogs Learn New Words?
Posted by Jason G. Goldman on May 10, 2010 …and what can word-learning in dogs teach us about the evolution of language in humans? What is involved in the learning of a single new word? Consider the word “tiger”, being learned by a child with already a modest vocabulary, at least for animal words. First the child must make a new entry in the…
Who Moved My Garden? Spatial Learning in the Octopus
Posted by Jason G. Goldman on April 28, 2010 Say you’re visiting Los Angeles and you have a sudden craving for Chinese food. Since you are only visiting, you might not be aware that nothing is open past, like, 10pm (not even coffee houses), but you get in your rental car and go driving around in search of your Chinese feast anyway. You try…