Sneaky Canines: No Longer Out of Sight Out of Mind – [Article]

Om nom nom nom

(University of Portsmouth, 11, Feb 2013) - Domestic dogs are much more likely to steal food when they think nobody can see them, suggesting for the first time they are capable of understanding a human’s point of view.

Many dog owners think their pets are clever or that they understand humans but, until now, this has not been tested by science.

Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology, has shown that when a human forbids a dog from taking food, dogs are four times more likely to disobey in a dark room than a lit room, suggesting they take into account what the human can or cannot see.

Dr Kaminski said: “That’s incredible because it implies dogs understand the human can’t see them, meaning they might understand the human perspective.”

This is the first study to examine if dogs differentiate between different levels of light when they are developing strategies on whether to steal food. It is published in the journal Animal Cognition. The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, Dr Kaminski’s former employer.

Dr Kaminski said: “Humans constantly attribute certain qualities and emotions to other living things. We know that our own dog is clever or sensitive, but that’s us thinking, not them.

“These results suggest humans might be right, where dogs are concerned, but we still can’t be completely sure if the results mean dogs have a truly flexible understanding of the mind and others’ minds. It has always been assumed only humans had this ability.”

The research is an incremental step in our understanding of dogs’ ability to think and understand which could, in turn, be of use to those who work with dogs, including the police, the blind and those who use gun dogs, as well as those who keep them as pets.

Dr Kaminski ran a series of experiments in varied light conditions. In each test, a dog was forbidden by a human from taking the food. When the room was dark, the dogs took more food and took it more quickly than when the room was lit.

The tests were complex and involved many variables to rule out that dogs were basing their decisions on simple associative rules, for example, that dark means food.

There is no evidence on how well dogs can see in the dark, but the results of this research show dogs can differentiate between light and dark.

Dr Kaminski said: “The results of these tests suggest that dogs are deciding it’s safer to steal the food when the room is dark because they understand something of the human’s perspective.”

Dogs’ understanding may be limited to the here and now, rather than on any higher understanding, Dr Kaminski said, and more research is needed to identify what mechanisms are controlling dogs’ behaviour.

In total, 42 female and 42 male domestic dogs aged one year or older took part in the tests. They were chosen only if they were comfortable without their owners in the room, even in complete darkness, and if they were interested in food. “Some dogs are more interested in by food than others,” Dr Kaminski said.

Previous studies have shown chimpanzees have a sophisticated understanding and seem to know when someone else can or can’t see them and can also remember what others have seen in the past. It is not known how sophisticated dogs’ understanding is in comparison. Many earlier research papers have found that, for dogs, a human’s eyes are an important signal when deciding how to behave, and that they respond more willingly to attentive humans, than inattentive ones.

Children 'May Grow Out of Autism' - [Article]

Is a label of autism lifelong? And is this child a cannibal? 

(BBC Health, 16, Jan 2013) - Some young children accurately diagnosed as autistic lose their symptoms and their diagnosis as they get older, say US researchers.  The findings of the National Institutes of Health study of 112 children appears to challenge the widely held belief that autism is a lifelong condition.

While not conclusive, the study, in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggests some children might possibly outgrow autism.

But experts urge caution.

Much more work is needed to find out what might explain the findings.

Dr Deborah Fein and her team at the University of Connecticut studied 34 children who had been diagnosed with autism in early childhood but went on to function as well as 34 other children in their classes at school.

On tests - cognitive and observational, as well as reports from the children's parents and school - they were indistinguishable from their classroom peers. They now showed no sign of problems with language, face recognition, communication or social interaction.

For comparison, the researchers also studied another 44 children of the same age, sex and non-verbal IQ level who had had a diagnosis of "high-functioning" autism - meaning they were deemed to be less severely affected by their condition.

It became clear that the children in the optimal outcome group - the ones who no longer had recognisable signs of autism - had had milder social deficits than the high-functioning autism group in early childhood, although they did have other autism symptoms, like repetitive behaviours and communication problems, that were as severe.

The researchers went back and checked the accuracy of the children's original diagnosis, but found no reason to suspect that they had been inaccurate.

The researchers say there are a number of possible explanations for their findings.

It might be that some children genuinely outgrow their condition. Or perhaps some can compensate for autism-related difficulties.

Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said: "Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes.

"Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term outcome for these children."

It could be that autism cannot always be accurately defined or diagnosed, particularly since the condition affects people in different ways.

Indeed, experts have disagreed about what autism is.

The American Psychiatric Association is currently revising its diagnostic manual - the "bible" for doctors that lists every psychiatric disorder and their symptoms.

Instead of using the current terms of autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified), people will be given an umbrella diagnosis of "autism spectrum disorder".

And their impairments will be reduced to two main areas - social communication/interaction and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities.

Most diagnoses in the UK are based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), published by the World Health Organization, which is up for revision in 2015.

According to the National Autistic Society, more than one in every 100 people, more than 500,000 people in all, in the UK have autism.

About a fifth, an estimated 106,000, are school-aged children.

Dr Judith Gould, director of the National Autistic Society's Lorna Wing Centre for Autism, said: "Autism is a lifelong disability affecting the way that people communicate and interact with others.

"This study is looking at a small sample of high functioning people with autism and we would urge people not to jump to conclusions about the nature and complexity of autism, as well its longevity.

"With intensive therapy and support, it's possible for a small sub-group of high functioning individuals with autism to learn coping behaviours and strategies which would 'mask' their underlying condition and change their scoring in the diagnostic tests used to determine their condition in this research.

"This research acknowledges that a diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time and it is important to recognise the support that people with autism need in order to live the lives of their choosing."

She said getting a diagnosis could be a critical milestone for children with autism and their families, often helping parents to understand their children better and helping them to support their children in reaching their full potential.

Are Crows Mind Readers ... Or Just Stressed Out? - [Article]

"Soon... my Lego castle will be complete!
Your people intelligence is no match for my bird intelligence"

(ScienceNOW, 10, Jan 2013) - Are crows mind readers? Recent studies have suggested that the birds hide food because they think others will steal it — a complex intuition that has been seen in only a select few creatures. Some critics have suggested that the birds might simply be stressed out, but new research reveals that crows may be gifted after all.

Journal article: Corvid Re-Caching without ‘Theory of Mind’:A Model

Cracks first began forming in the crow mind-reading hypothesis last year. One member of a research team from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands spent 7 months in bird cognition expert Nicola Clayton’s University of Cambridge lab in the United Kingdom studying Western scrub jays, a member of the crow family that is often used for these studies. The Groningen team then developed a computer model in which “virtual jays” cached food under various conditions.

In PLOS ONE, they argued that the model showed the jays’ might be moving their food—or recaching it—not because they were reading the minds of their competitors, but simply because of the stress of having another bird present (especially a more dominant one) and of losing food to thieves. The result contradicted previous work by Clayton’s group suggesting that crows might have a humanlike awareness of other creatures’ mental states—a cognitive ability known as theory of mind that has been claimed in dogs, chimps, and even rats.

In the new study, Clayton and her Cambridge graduate student James Thom decided to test the stress hypothesis. First, they replicated earlier work on scrub jays by letting the birds hide peanuts in trays of ground corn cobs—either unobserved or with another bird watching—and later giving them a chance to rebury them. As in previous studies, the jays recached a much higher proportion of the peanuts if another bird could see them: nearly twice as much as in private, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.

Then came the stress test. First, Thom and Clayton gave the jays trays with the ground cobs but no food to hide in them—a so-called “sham” session. Then, in a second session, they gave the birds new hiding trays and bowls of peanuts to hide. When the jays were done, the experimenters removed the trays and stole all of the peanuts. Finally, after a short break, the researchers gave each bird yet another round of food, a new tray to hide it in, and one of the trays it had seen earlier: either the sham tray or the ransacked “pilfer” tray. The jays had 10 minutes for recaching.

If the Groningen model was correct, Thom and Clayton argue, the stress of discovering that food was missing from the pilfer tray ought to drive jays to cache more peanuts than those presented with the sham tray. In fact, there was no difference, even though corvids have excellent memories for hidden food and remarkable abilities to find it again. The hypothesis that jays have theory of mind remains on the table, Thom says.

Thom and Clayton have “definitely shown that scrub recaching is not as simple as the [Groningen] model presents it,” says Elske van der Vaart, lead author of the Groningen team’s earlier report, who is now at the University of Amsterdam. But she argues that there is still room for doubt about what the results mean. For example, the sham condition—in which the jays had no food to cache—could have stressed the birds as much as the stolen peanuts in the pilfer condition did.

Amanda Seed, an animal cognition researcher at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, says the Groningen model’s failure to predict the birds’ caching behavior in the new experiments could “bring the model down like a pack of cards.” But researchers still have to rule out other possible explanations, she says. For example, the birds given pilfered tray may have noticed the missing peanuts too late to affect their overall caching rate, or they may have spent much of their time looking for the missing nuts instead of hiding the new ones. The Cambridge and Groningen groups are planning more work with both real and “virtual” birds to see what is really going on. “I applaud them for rising to the challenge,” Seed says.

Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

TED (Oct, 10. 2011) - "Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species," says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play.