Transcription

Intro

Persaud: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.

Now, here is your host, Laura Mickes.

Preface

Mickes: Welcome back to my interview with Professor Stephen Lea. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, you should go back and listen. 

In this part, Part 2, you’ll hear Stephen’s thoughts on stinky mice, you’ll hear how I tried to use superior grey squirrel performance over red squirrel performance as a source of national pride without getting very far at all, and other tips and facts from this gentleman and scholar.

We left off at Stephen referring to the parameter in his model used to measure behavioral flexibility as the magical parameter U. And here, I start this part by asking him if he modeled a lot of animals behaviors trying to solve problems.

Let’s get back to it.

Interview proper

Mickes: Did you model a lot of animals’ behaviors trying to solve this problem?

Lea: Actually, this was based on experiments that had been carried out by a PhD student, who is interestingly named Pizza Chow, whom Lisa Leaver and I were supervising. And this was a study of squirrels extracting nuts from a particularly fiendish apparatus that Pizza had devised in which there were various things they could do.

Some of which involved them going away from a nut which they could see, which we felt would be a thoroughly unprepared response. One hard to learn because it’s a detour task and detour tasks, particularly from visible food, are hard for animals to learn.

Mickes: Did they do it?

Lea: Oh yeah, they did it. That was one of the… I’ll come back to that point.

Mickes: Okay.

Lea: The other thing was that they either had to pull or push at leavers and we thought, and to this day I get confused as to which was which. We thought one of those, they’d be much more likely to do it than the other and they did it the other way round.

Mickes: [Laughs]

Lea: Which is just the sort of thing that animals always do to you.

Did they take the detour? Yes, they did. And this is one of the ways in which simulation represented a slightly idealized situation because I made the simulation rather harder for the simulated squirrels than the actual problem turned out to be for the real squirrels because they all solved this task the first time they saw it.

Mickes: Really?

Lea: That’s at least was true the, the small colony of squirrels we tried it on first, which was some gray squirrels we were holding in the laboratory. We had a rather wonderful squirrel world downstairs where they had a lot of space they could run around in and they could come and test themselves on the apparatus.

But then when Pizza tried it out in the field, taking the apparatus, putting it down in the field, even the video camera watching it, then we did get some animals that uh, didn’t solve it. And uh, rather tragically for those of us who have romantic views about native species, the probability of a red squirrel solving the task was rather lower than that of a gray squirrel solving it —

Mickes: The ones you brought in from America.

Lea: That’s right.

Mickes: Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here.

Lea: Yes. Mind you, what we’ve not yet done is to go back to the Carolinas and test, uh, American gray squirrels cause it may be the only ones that survived the journey across the Atlantic were the smart ones.

Mickes: Right!

Lea: They’ve left smart genes.

Mickes: Sounds like a grant application idea.

Lea: Yeah.

Mickes: Yeah.

Lea: Could be. [Laughs].

Mickes: [Laughs]

Lea: So, do you test a lot of simulated animals? Typically you, you run the thing a thousand times with the same initial assumptions, but there’s always a random process in what’s going on. If a response has a certain probability it occurs at random with that probability, for example. Given the animal, a variety of possible responses and you give a probability distribution across those responses. And then in the simulation, you would just sample random numbers and choose a response on that basis. So you do that a thousand or 10,000 times in order to see what sort of performance you get. And then you do that again with a different value of your U parameter.

Mickes: Right.

Lea: And then another one and so on. And see if you can get interesting variation in the behavior of the model that corresponds in a qualitative sense. We’re by no means yet at the stage of looking for quantitative matching. That corresponds in the qualitative sense with the differences between animals that you think of as behaviorally flexible and behaviorally inflexible.

You asked whether the U parameter was good. Well, it worked and it didn’t work.

It worked in the sense that it did produce variation in the problem-solving behavior of the simulated animals, both in the speed of finding a solution and the kind of solution or the kind of process of finding a solution that was gone through. So in that respect, yes it did what we hoped for.

In another respect, it didn’t because I could not put my hand on my heart and say whether I thought that high U or low U corresponds to what we mean by high behavioral flexibility because the differences it produced were not entirely coherent and in a sense, it produced a number of different changes. And I’m still puzzling about how some of them should be interpreted.

That’s the trouble with Special Issues. You have to go to press at a given date,

Mickes: [Laugh]

Lea: not just keep thinking, but then that’s a useful discipline.

Mickes: Yeah, that’s right. So people will follow up and they’ll tweak the model.

Lea: Well that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

To make it easier for them, I’ve actually made a working version of the model available through one of the open science foundation sites so you can actually download the model and run it.

Mickes: That’s really helpful.

Lea: And one of the reviewers of the paper actually did it. I know.

Mickes: Really?

Lea: Yeah. I was surprised, but —

Mickes: That’s excellent.

Lea: Yes, a very conscientious reviewer.

Mickes: I love a reviewer like that.

Lea: Yeah, right.

Mickes: Can I ask you some silly questions?

Lea: Yeah.

Mickes: Okay. Thank you. You’ve worked with dogs, humans, mice, pigeons, rats, and squirrels. Do you have a least favorite and what is it and do you have a favorite and what is it?

Lea: I’ve got a least favorite of that list. I’ve never published anything on mice. And that’s because I did work with them for a time for teaching purposes because mice obviously are a good model if you’re interested in genetic differences because you can get inbred strains.

Lea: And they’re horrible to keep, they smell.

Mickes: Oh!

Lea: Rats do not smell. Not if you look after them properly.

Mickes: Oh?

Lea: Mice can’t help smelling. They secrete a substance in their urine.

Mickes: Ew.

Lea: I think it’s N-Methylacetamide if I remember my A level chemistry and uh, it’s a nasty, musty smell and you can imagine what a colony of a thousand of them smells like.

Mickes: No! [Laughs]

Lea: No mice for me.

I interviewed a developmental psychologist, she studies cognition in infants and I said, aren’t they the cutest participants ever? And she said, well they do smell.

[Laughs]

Mickes: Sounds like the mice are probably worse than the babies. [Laughs]

Lea: Yeah. It must be the most undignified bit of being a baby that people pick you up by the armpits and sniff your bottom.

Mickes: [Laughs]

Lea: Yep, you need a nappy change.

Mickes: Okay. Back to your favorite species to work with.

Lea: Yeah. That’s hard because actually I also have favorites, as it were, preferences about the way you study animals. But in terms of animals, the animals I most enjoyed interacting with, it has to be the rats, which is what I started with as a student and a PhD student.

But I had to give up because I became very, very allergic to them as a lot of people who work with rats do. And after my third visit to the doctor with extreme hay fever and other allergic responses, he looked at me coldly and said, do you really have to work with rats? And I had to admit that I didn’t. I had a colony of pigeons as well. So I shifted my attention to them.

Mickes: The pigeons are fine?

Lea: Pigeons are fine unless I have to clean their cages.

Mickes: [Laughs].

Lea: Then I become very allergic.

Mickes: [Laughs] Selective.

Okay, one more thing. What would you tell those of us who only use human participants? Are we missing a trick?

Lea: I think you’re missing more than one trick.

The first one, the most obvious one. And so what they know of England who only England know. And you know, what do you know of humans who only humans know?

You don’t really understand what it is to be human unless you also know what it is to be non-human. And although of course, we all interact with other animal species, uh, in different ways, unless you’ve studied them with the same sorts of tools that you use for studying human psychology, then you don’t really understand what it is that’s so different and special about humans.

The second trick I think that we miss if we only look at humans is that we miss the possibility of a particular kind of explanation of human behavior or worse, we abuse it. Uh, and that’s an explanation in terms of the theory of evolution. The last grand theory of everything standing in psychology really is evolutionary theory, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology with a capital E and a capital P.

Mickes: Yea.

Lea: I don’t agree with a lot of that stuff, but nonetheless, it is a theory that is capable of being deployed on almost any problem. But you deploy it in a very impoverished way if you only think about one species. Evolutionary analysis requires comparative analysis.

And then there is a third trick certainly that you miss if you only ever work with humans. And that’s that very particular sensation you get when you’re walking along a sunlit cliff, Looking down at sparkling seawater with a stopwatch in one hand and a clipboard in the other and binoculars in your third.

Mickes: Yeah.

Lea: And you suddenly think to yourself, I’m working!

Mickes: [Laughs] I think we should end on that. And I’ll go to the beach. Is there a beach nearby?

Concluding statement

Persaud: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.

If you would like to share your feedback on this episode, we hope you’ll get in touch! You can find us online at www.psychonomic.org, or on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

If you liked this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us a review. Reviews help us grow our audience and reach more people with the latest scientific research.