Animal's ability to plan future events

[jtbell]

A year or two ago, there was an article in the New York Times about experiments on animals' thought processes. It included a picture of a squirrel monkey, with a "thought balloon" that read something like, "When is one sweet juicy date better than two sweet juicy dates? Because I have LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE that when I take only one date, I get more water later on. It makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE, but when you live in a lab, you get used to this."

 

[CRGreathouse]

I think it shows some bit of forethought. To realize the need to hide food for future use is fairly simple and common among animals. To realize that others may find the hidden food and take it requires a bit more thought though is still relatively common. To carry out a charade of hiding something in multiple different locations so as to confuse observers though is pretty unique and requires some thought. Especially when the crow continues the charade long after hiding the food to make sure they take their competitors well off the trail. I would think this behavior would also have to be learned, I doubt it would be instinctual.

And as I mentioned crows use tools. They have been observed to fashion tools by bending bits of metal like paper clips and even putting a small hook on the end. To observe an object that you are unable to get to, go looking for something to use as a tool, fashion a tool with the material you find and even create a hook on it to better serve your endeavour I think shows some forethought.

Making and using tools does seem to show abstract reasoning -- I wouldn't usually call this forethought, but that's a mere matter of semantics. This is a task that requires little reasoning and would be complicated to develop evolutionarily as a FSM (call it what you will), so I tentatively accept it as reasoning.

Claiming the hiding of food as learned behavior (or to be more extreme, novel and intentional behavior) seems entirely unwarranted to me. There's always been a need to hide food, and it would be much easier to encode instructions for hiding food than for flying, mating habits, and other things accepted as instinctual.

 

[baywax]

Claiming the hiding of food as learned behavior (or to be more extreme, novel and intentional behavior) seems entirely unwarranted to me. There's always been a need to hide food, and it would be much easier to encode instructions for hiding food than for flying, mating habits, and other things accepted as instinctual.

One can point to how ants store food in their nests, as do bees. Is this forethought or a naturally selected behaviour trait? I'd tend toward the idea of it being a product of natural selection amongst the genetics determining neuron development.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Claiming the hiding of food as learned behavior (or to be more extreme, novel and intentional behavior) seems entirely unwarranted to me. There's always been a need to hide food, and it would be much easier to encode instructions for hiding food than for flying, mating habits, and other things accepted as instinctual.

My point wasn't the hiding of food in and of itself but the strategy of using trickery to throw off other animals.

 

[hypatia]

My dog is planning her birthday party, which is next week. And she says your all invited!

 

[CRGreathouse]

My point wasn't the hiding of food in and of itself but the strategy of using trickery to throw off other animals.

Thus my finite-state program showing that, once you know how to hide food, it's very easy to deceive others. It's much harder (and no more helpful) to envision other animals, determine their wants to be similar to yours, determine that they will search for the food you hide, and realize that pretending to hide will cause them to possibly look in those places to the exclusion of the true hiding place.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

My dog is planning her birthday party, which is next week. And she says your all invited!

An obvious ploy for gifts.

 

[rootX]

My dog is planning her birthday party, which is next week. And she says your all invited!

It would be pretty interesting if she really knows that her birthday is coming in some dog time units ...