let me start my work late today is to
understand the behavior of animals those
up there are examples of the animals on
which I worked along my career and in
every single case I’ve been fascinated
as most people are by the extraordinary
things the animals do and what they know
how to do they can build wonderful nests
that can navigate home from a distance
they know how to raise their offspring
all these things but wordless knowledge
come from does it come from their genes
does it come from their understanding
and this is what I’m going to discuss
today so from the point of view of the
theme of today my main concern is how
does knowledge get transmitted through
which channels and good as knowledge
constitutes in any case in animals or of
course in our particular species which
is and us as we are sitting here so
let’s start by classifying the kinds of
knowledge that animals have there are
different sources and some knowledge
comes straight from the sign from the
way that animals are built because of
their history through natural selection
some kind of knowledge come through
reasoning to the fact that they can
learn something in one situation and
transmit it to another and they can
operate without information and some
comes from learning from their
experience on the problems they are
facing or learning from others and I’m
going to go in a sweep analysis through
all these different forms let’s focus
first on design suppose that you face
the problem of how to teach a frog to
operate an iphone you might think that
is very hard but they actually do it
almost as well as any teenager and
certainly better than most of us at our
age of my age
and just by responding to the way they
have asked these animals are selected by
evolution to respond to things that are
elongated and move along their main axis
because things they do that are mostly
bugs so they could in theory be more
selective more finicky about it but if
they did they would miss many real bugs
on the other hand if they responded to
anything with whatever movement and
shape they would be kind of triggering
their tongue every time two things which
are not parts so natural selection can
do that and it sculptures their
knowledge through evolution and it
passes through the generations through
jeans let’s go to a more complex
phenomenon in this case we are looking
at a cockatoo that’s facing a very
complex problem there is a nut at the
end of this process actually in a small
window that you’ll see next to the wheel
that appears there and in order to open
the window the animal needs to shift the
bar but they can’t do that because the
wheel is there so in order to actually
shift the bar it needs to turn the wheel
son to turn the wheel to align it to the
to their pin that is there and move it
forward so that the bar can go through
but it can’t turn the wheel because
there is a kind of cylinder still
cylinder there that is holding it in
place with a notch so in order to move
the wheel it has to lift that cylinder
but it can’t leave the cylinder because
there is a screw there that has to be
undone all the time but the screw cannot
be undone because there is a pin at the
end so if you expose a cockatoo for
about two hours this is what you see
this animal doing so by this the animal
knows exactly what to do you can see it
first taking the pin that it did there
and now is operating the screw and the
element has learned by trying with all
the different pieces what brings it
closer to the target which in this case
is completing the series of locks
interestingly it doesn’t get any reward
at the end of each particular movement
it only gets a reward when it completes
the whole operation and this is when it
finally succeeds now let’s try to judge
whether they really understood anything
at the end of this process of learning
in order to do that what we do is to
transform the problem we sometimes
remove the wheel with some time I’m
blocking you sometimes you remove the
wheel sometimes of remove the screw and
what we look at is after many different
transformations whether they follow the
routine of actions that they followed in
the first case on they are actually
going directly to the thing that has to
be done in this particular location so
let me move forward in this case for
example these describes all the
transformations we’ve done and what is
the lock that the animals had to operate
after that particular transformation and
in the graph we show the data showing
exactly what they do right whenever you
see a star what it means is that the
first things they touch was the thing
that was a correct thing what you would
have done after understanding what is
the problem so they significantly
learned something about the mechanicus
of mechanical properties of the system
and not simply a series of actions what
is transmitted is some form of
understanding which is our task to
actually explore so if we move on and we
ask what can get transmitted by social
observation we can watch another
cockatoo in this case is one called
figure that discovered by itself how to
produce a tool in order to reach a nut
which is out of his cage and they did it
entirely spontaneously by cutting a
piece of wood from the beam in the
aviary and holding in its mouth and
using it to actually operate it
appropriately as one of us would do to
actually extract it so this story that
only human
some may be chimps could you operate
with tools has long been left behind but
what is interesting for me in this
particular case is that only one cooker
two out of many seem to learn this
because he had a kind of constellation
of situations that led to this
particular new form of understanding so
we thought what would happen if this
animal displayed its skill to other
conspecifics would they learn from him
and if they do what kind of knowledge
would be transmitted from Figueroa to
the others and so we did the following
experiment what you see here is in the
top a diagram which shows an observer a
problem where there is an app what it
says apparatus is just a cage with food
inside and I figure out which in the top
diagram is sitting on the shoulder of an
experimenter and in the bottom one is
actually facing the problem itself is
actually displaying its skill after
doing it we allow the observer animal to
interact with the apparatus and look
what happens in this case what you first
see is figural doing its own
demonstration and as you see figure does
it by holding the tool from the distal
end and keeping it in the air and poking
through the openings of the mesh as it
did in its cage in order to reach at the
nut and finally obtain it but now watch
what the observers did in this case they
also discover how to use a tool but what
you see here is that the form of
operating the tool is entirely different
from what the teacher did it learned
discovered a better way of doing it
appropriate for the case where the floor
is slippery as in the conditions of the
test which wasn’t originally one figure
discovered this is another animal that
does it in completely different way it
uses his tongue to push the tool in but
also discovers a better way that were
the teacher did this is extremely
important for us as educators as well as
to for us animal behaviorist what these
animals have done is to emulate the
teacher by actually getting the idea
that you can use tools and what tools
can be useful for but they didn’t
actually imitate the specific movements
that the teacher used that’s what we
would like in our best students that we
would like on for our best teachers to
actually be able to transmit ideas and
convince students to think by themselves
transmit ways of thinking but now let’s
consider the problem of one individual
that discovers something in one
situation and has to face a completely
different one in this case the animals
have learned to make a tool by actually
clipping a piece of wood out of a piece
of a pine wood which is long and has
fibers and they can use it in this
apparatus to obtain the nut that is
being held there but immediately after
learning that we give them an entirely
different material and we say can you
transmit your discovery of tool use by
making them in one particular from one
particular substrate to an entirely
different one like actually having
tweaks that need to be sculptured by
removing lateral twigs and leaves and
they all did it immediately so once
again what they transmitted from one
case to another is not generalizing the
actions but getting the idea that you
can use a tool but what if we give them
a completely unstructured material like
a piece of cardboard that actually
hasn’t got any fibers and because of
that has to be cut and God at the right
leg ended at this right length so that
actually and it has to write with so
they can go through the whole of the
apparatus and can actually serve as a
tool they also did it not all of them
but some of them d so once again just as
one individual can learn from another to
think about the problem and the general
idea of the solution rather than copying
the
actions one individual can translate
into another situation ways of thinking
ways of solving the problem that include
a great deal of innovation so what we
would like in general is to follow the
way that wisdom travels in nature we
want to understand that some wisdom can
travel through genes through generations
and is built in our brains as much as in
the brains of different species but it’s
not a general-purpose machine is built
to do certain jobs whatever helps us in
the light of natural selection but we
also want to know that this wisdom this
know how can be transmitted but in that
case we need to understand what is it
that can be transmitted is his ways of
doing or is a ways of thinking or its
ways of solving problems and we also
want of course to transport things
through reasoning and understanding in
many cases we understand how things get
copied in terms of the channel of
transmission but we don’t know exactly
what is it that has been transmitted
even in a case so simple as the
cockatoos that actually got the idea aha
I can use a tool for this but the tool
I’m going to use has to be new I’m going
to invent it I’m going to design a new
and / 14 the current situation they
don’t have guidance for that even in
those situation we don’t understand well
what is the content of what is
transmitted but we do know that a
malaysian that is the use of a role
model to attempt a problem by ways of
thinking ways of tackling in innovation
learning to innovate is more important
that actually just copying fix actions
in order to repeat like a parrot as it were thank