Having just re-read Michael Tomasello’s great book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, on my flights back from Europe, I found this post from Greg Downey and his graduate student, Paul Keil, fascinating. Paul and Greg describe the interaction and mutual perception of intent and outcome between a sheep herder, his dog and the sheep:
In the demonstration for Paul, Damian intentionally gave Whiskey a bad command, encouraging the dog to move in a way that was likely to cause the sheep to bolt out of control. After the sheep got loose, Damian described his interaction with Whiskey:
“I made the dog come around this way [clockwise around the mob of three sheep]. He said, ‘They’re gonna get away.’ He didn’t want to come. He said, ‘I think it’s a bad call.’ And I argued with him, and I said, ‘No. Come!’ And he said, ‘Nah nah… I tell you, they’re gonna go.’ And then he started to come, and the sheep started to go, and then he went, ‘See, I told ya’…”
Of course, at no time did Whiskey actually speak to Damian. And Damian’s signals were whistles, shouts, and gestures, much simpler than the elaborate interpretation that Damian offered in his post-interaction analysis.Damian was explaining his perceptions of his dog’s thoughts as the two of them, together, interacted with three other animals, the sheep. Five individuals – three species – all attentive, probing, anticipating what the others were doing. In Damian and Whiskey’s brief demonstration of herding technique on their farm for Paul, Damian had hoped that the bad command would highlight Whiskey’s own instincts to herd, the dog’s perceptions of what the sheep were inclined to do, and the dog’s understanding of what he and Damian were trying to accomplish.
Tomasello’s book is largely an argument, based primarily on extensive developmental cognitive psychology work, for the evolutionary significance of a culturally and communication driven “ratchet effects.” The ability to recognize the intent and agency in others creates the opportunity for generative communication, communication that can be transfered with modification to other agency-endowed individuals in a process analogous to genetic evolution. This process, which might also be compared to taking advantage of the increased processing power of a networked computer system (as opposed to a single, stand-alone computer), is arguably important for understanding the broad pattern of Pleistocene human evolution and certainly important for the cultural explosion that occurs at the end of the Pleistocene. The above example illustrates the power of such processes to not only tie humans to one another, but also to connect them with other elements of their environment.
Downey and Keil go on to review the importance of expertise in the context of inter-species communicative interactions.
Being an expert at interacting with dogs not only means a brain that’s better attuned to how dogs communicate; in fact, experts and non-experts, in most respects, are quite similar. Expertise means having behaviour patterns that include knowing where to search the animal’s body for information and greater tendency to ‘mentalise’ or impute motives to the animals (whether those projections are accurate is a separate question).
The whole piece is worth reading.
