These are all excellent "concerns" :) and indeed something we are trying to be careful about.
I realize that I might not have been super clear in my presentation about the nature of the clips compared to the nature of the research. Those clips are NOT the data we are using to make any scientific claims. They are just easy to use examples in presentations to convey the type of phenomena that participants in the study have described, shown, raised and that we are trying to monitor through different means. In other words, the clips are absolutely anecdotal and several alternative interpretations are possible. I would be a very bad scientist if I claimed that the clip in which Flambo asks for water for Espeon is by itself clear evidence of Flambo caring for the other dog living in the house (note though that Espeon goes to drink water when water is provided and Flambo does not touch the water bowl, hence the explanation that Flambo was asking for water for himself does not quite work here). What I am rather saying is that out of the thousands of participants in the study, a few dozens have suggested that one of their pets, the most proficient one with the soundboard, appears to be using it to ask for help for other pets in the household. I have seen myself at least another dozen clips from different households where pets do things that on the surface seem to convey that they care and are trying to help. For example I have seen several clips where one dog is stuck outside or behind a door that suddenly closed and the other goes to the soundboard calling the human for help, often mentioning the name of the other pet. The one pushing the buttons does not move away from the buttons in those cases and indeed the human realizes that the help is not for the button presser, who appears completely fine, but rather for the other one, barking behind a door. Is this clear evidence that they care for others? probably not, and that is why we need to collect these instances systematically and possibly replicate these scenarios in behavioral experiments. But they resonate with research conducted for example with rats showing them opening a restrainer for another rat to let them out, research published in Science (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1210789) While we can debate whether a rat might experience empathy, we have scientific experimental evidence showing that dogs can produce empathy-like responses to distress calls from other dogs (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152920) so I am not sure it is too far fetched to believe that they can be "concerned" or experience empathy for their fellow pets in the house when they are in distress.
This said, I agree 100% that at this stage of our knowledge we cannot trust that a dog pressing "sad" or "mad" or "concerned" is actually experiencing the emotion that humans would label as such. Hence we need more research. But we also know that when I say "I am sad" and you say "I am sad", we have most likely different representations of what "sad" means and we have no access to what the other is actually experiencing. It is the label we were taught as children when we were experiencing specific situations in the world. To put it differently, the current state of research on emotions in humans would not warrant any evidence that 2 humans have the same representation of "concerned", though to some degree those representations most likely overlap enough to allow us to communicate and make sense of each other.
So how do we learn emotions as humans? Not by operant conditioning but by having caregivers label what we are going through and developing a strong association between the physiological experience and the label we have been provided.
The way the participants in the study are training their pets with buttons is very similar to how we would teach language to a child. By using the buttons to describe what is going on and/or announce what is going to happen. We call it "modeling". And over time the pets start using the buttons and the humans produce appropriate responses that count as the reward. Both classical and operant conditioning are at play, but what we care about the most is not how they learn buttons (though it is important) but most importantly how they use it. So if they tell the human "belly ouch" and then a few minutes later they puke... we have reason to believe that they were talking about actual pain. And if they say "ear ouch" or "paw ouch" and we see that indeed they are irritated or there is something stack in their paw, they might be talking about pain that they are actually experiencing.
While we should not anthropomorphize the pets, I agree with you 100%, we should also not end up on the other side of the spectrum, somehow denying the very possibility that they might experience and be able to communicate about emotions and pain and distress and be responsive to it.
I welcome all the help and advice that we can get and skepticism is the most important ingredient of science. Lots of what we currently think might be the case will likely turn out to be a fluke. That is why we are careful about what we can actually claim scientifically and the evidence we have for it. But I do believe that if we start with the assumption that "dogs" cannot experience empathy or be concerned for other dogs... we might be missing out on a chance to discover something quite fundamental about them. We should be careful and skeptical. But we should be open minded. or at least that is what I am trying to be ;)
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Federico Rossano
Associate Professor
UCSD
CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-04-2023 09:27 AM
From: Karina Reyes
Subject: Community Conversations - 10/2/23 - Can Our Pets Tell Us What They Are Thinking?
Very interesting talk yesterday! I taught my dog to ring a bell to go potty--I'm sure lots of people have done this. But, duh (!), it never occurred to me to use more buttons and teach her other things. I see that the effectiveness of button board communication relies on operant conditioning principles, whereby a reward is given to the dog in order to get the dog to repeat the behavior in the future. In the absence of bacon bits in the dog videos we saw, I assume that the "reward" for dogs is getting what the dog is asking for--water, to go out. In addition, I have to also assume that there is reward in the mere communication--getting your attention, you talking to them and interacting with them. Where I was impressed/confused/a bit skeptical is with two scenarios--1) where a dog asks for water for their pal and 2) where a dog "expresses" concern. I am very curious about how these "skills" were taught. I get 'press the button' for water or to go potty--that seems straightforward. But how was the emotion of concern taught to or "trained" into the dog? Yes, we can give a dog a lot of credit and say the dog is genuinely concerned. But is it possible that we are anthropomorphizing the dog's behavior and that it did not reflect actual concern? And with the dog that wants water for their canine pal, I wonder if the dog advocating for the canine roommate also drinks from that bowl and was simply asking to have that bowl refilled so they can have water rather than have it refilled out of concern for their buddy. Was there a starting point for what concern means and how it is identified as concern? In other words, what is the operational definition for concern? How do we get to call something "concern"?
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Karina Reyes
President, CEO
Citizen Canine Senior Dog Rescue
IL
Original Message:
Sent: 09-28-2023 10:54 AM
From: Maddie's Pet Forum Admin
Subject: Community Conversations - 10/2/23 - Can Our Pets Tell Us What They Are Thinking?
Updated 10/2 at 2:03pm - Recording now available to watch on-demand!
We hope to see you on Monday, 10/2 at 11am PT for our next Community Conversations call. We'll be joined by Dr. Federico Rossano, Founder and Director at Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego as he presents the research on the use of button pressing in dogs and cats which help animals communicate their needs.
Once the idea of a talking pet was restricted to children's books. Today, pet owners are endeavoring to train their dogs, cats and other animals to communicate through words. In this talk I will introduce you to the largest community science project ever undertaken in the field of animal intelligence, spanning thousands of participants from 47 countries and including several social media stars such as Bunny the Talking Dog. I will showcase how soundboards with world-labeled buttons can be used by animals to express their needs, wants and feelings, and how we are studying this phenomenon scientifically. We believe the findings of this study have the potential to ultimately change how we interact with animals, improve their rights and mainly help protect their welfare.
Featured Guest Speaker: Federico Rossano is an Associate Professor in the department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He obtained a laurea (BA+MA) in Communication Studies with a specialization in Semiotics from the University of Bologna (Italy). He received his PhD in Linguistics from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and has worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). He has authored publications on psychotherapeutic interactions, joint attention and voice following in human infants and non-human primates, the development of property concerns, social norms, value perception and distributive and procedural justice in human ontogeny, gaze behavior in face-to-face interactions in different human cultures, gesture ontogeny and the development of communicative signals in baby non-human primates. His current research adopts a comparative perspective on social cognition and is focused on the development of communicative abilities and social norms in human and non-human primates.
#Behavior,TrainingandEnrichment
#DataandTechnology
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Maddie's Pet Forum Admin
Maddie's Fund
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