“What’s different here…is that the pigs had to grasp the very difficult concept that the thing they were manipulating (the joystick) was having its effect on a 2-dimensional computer-generated image (the cursor) that they could not touch, smell or interact with directly. That sort of conceptual learning is a huge mental leap for any animal, as this would never happen in the real world.”
“There is nothing in the natural behavior or evolutionary history of the pig that would have suggested they could do this to any degree,” Croney added.
… sigh.
I mean, I get so tired of biologists (and other researchers across the natural sciences!) even in 2021 still working from a default assumption that humans are oh-so-special and unique and entirely, utterly separate from other animals. Despite the existing - and growing - mountain of evidence that this assumption is utter nonsense.
I mean, the exact same thing said in these quotes could be said about humans. They even act as if “natural behaviour” is a useful term - animals learning and teaching new behaviours is widely documented, after all, so what constitutes “natural behaviour”? Observed behaviour not likely influenced by humans? Sure. But again, what constitutes “natural”? Isn’t the learning and transmission of knowledge culture?
Their framing also seems to show some rather simplistic thinking of how abstract thinking works - is “move the joystick and the nearby but not obviously connected dot moves to match” really that much more of an abstract idea than “remove dirt in a specific spot when prompted by smell, and there might be a mushroom beneath”? Sure, the mushroom might be perceptible through smell, but the dot is perceptible through vision, and it really doesn’t take a huge amount of trial and error to deduce that it moves in sync with movements of the joystick. A huge amount of animals are capable of learning through trial and error.
IMO, while this research is great overall, the researchers seem to be overstating the abstractness and complexity of the tasks presented, and are being far too narrow and literal in their interpretations of how these tasks might compare to “natural” tasks in the “real world”.
