[From Bruce Gregory (990121.1050 EST)]
PBS carried a program last night on thinking in animals. I found it
particularly interesting in light of the book I am reading called
_Visual Intelligence_. The latter examines what we know about the
construction of the visual world. The author's approach is to treat the
processing of visual information _as if_ it were a rule-based procedure.
The book contains lots of interesting material about higher level
perceptions. Watching the show last night, I could well imagine that
much of the "thinking" going on could be considered as demonstrating
perceptual control at fairly high levels. The advantage of working with
animals in this regard is that they are "unencumbered" by language. Many
higher level perceptions that we associate with language apparently do
not at all require linguistic symbol manipulation (categorizing things
as numbers or letters). The show also had a few nice demonstrations of
animals not doing things they had been "rewarded" for on the immediately
preceding trial even though they were still interested in the rewards.
Seems like fertile ground to me, even though the apes did not tell jokes
or proselytize.
Bruce Gregory