Hi Jason, apologies for my delayed reply as well. I’m quite interested in Invertebrate Sentience project and am happy to share some of my knowledge on these topics. My background was originally in robotics and I’ve worked on invertebrate sensory neuroscience from a fairly reductionist viewpoint (and wouldn’t previously have been very concerned by questions on consciousness!). While my research was always quite concentrated on vision in flying insects, I felt that I gained quite a well-rounded perspective on invertebrate neuroscience in the labs I worked at and the conference I went to. I think this might be quite common amongst invertebrate neuroscientists—compared to vertebrate fields there are a smaller number of people working on a larger range of organisms so I think there tends to be more intermingling of ideas. Funnily enough, the thing that probably took me longest to adapt to was not treating insects as little input-output automatons but I suspect that if you were to do some insect research your background would lead you to over-anthropomorphise. There is often a fine line between things you can reliably expect insects to do reflexively vs. similar tasks that result in much more variation in what they will do.
Agreed the learning is a complicated issue. My perspective was mostly in trying to separate out things that seem complicated because of the motor component compared to the complexity of the contextual component (which I agree is probably a more important indicator of cognitive flexibility). A taxonomy of learning capability would be interesting (I would assume psychologists have done this for human children), but I wonder if it would necessarily match between taxa—it is possible that different types of phenomenal learning can be performed by a variety of neural architectures, so some organisms may find non-elemental learning easier than elemental learning if that is what they have been exposed to most during evolution.
With regards to novelty, I think it could actually be something quite useful for indicating valanced experience. I’m not an expert on this, but I understand that as well as positively and negatively cued stimulus, novelty can act as a ‘bottom-up’ modulator for selective attention in flies. Further, mutant Drosophila that with abnormal response to novelty are found to have disturbances in learning and memory. Bruno van Swinderen’s lab is doing some interesting work on this, and he has discussed using ‘bottom-up’ modulators to investigate ‘top-down’ selective attention (which seems pretty key to subjective experience in humans). It is possible that novelty is analogous to positive reinforcement in some situations (like developmental learning) but I think Bruno would argue that it can be deeper, because it indicates the animal is actively engaged in learning new information about the world (and I’m sure he’d be happy to talk further on this if you’d like).
I hope to get to replying about navigation tomorrow :)
Hi Jason, apologies for my delayed reply as well. I’m quite interested in Invertebrate Sentience project and am happy to share some of my knowledge on these topics. My background was originally in robotics and I’ve worked on invertebrate sensory neuroscience from a fairly reductionist viewpoint (and wouldn’t previously have been very concerned by questions on consciousness!). While my research was always quite concentrated on vision in flying insects, I felt that I gained quite a well-rounded perspective on invertebrate neuroscience in the labs I worked at and the conference I went to. I think this might be quite common amongst invertebrate neuroscientists—compared to vertebrate fields there are a smaller number of people working on a larger range of organisms so I think there tends to be more intermingling of ideas. Funnily enough, the thing that probably took me longest to adapt to was not treating insects as little input-output automatons but I suspect that if you were to do some insect research your background would lead you to over-anthropomorphise. There is often a fine line between things you can reliably expect insects to do reflexively vs. similar tasks that result in much more variation in what they will do.
Agreed the learning is a complicated issue. My perspective was mostly in trying to separate out things that seem complicated because of the motor component compared to the complexity of the contextual component (which I agree is probably a more important indicator of cognitive flexibility). A taxonomy of learning capability would be interesting (I would assume psychologists have done this for human children), but I wonder if it would necessarily match between taxa—it is possible that different types of phenomenal learning can be performed by a variety of neural architectures, so some organisms may find non-elemental learning easier than elemental learning if that is what they have been exposed to most during evolution.
With regards to novelty, I think it could actually be something quite useful for indicating valanced experience. I’m not an expert on this, but I understand that as well as positively and negatively cued stimulus, novelty can act as a ‘bottom-up’ modulator for selective attention in flies. Further, mutant Drosophila that with abnormal response to novelty are found to have disturbances in learning and memory. Bruno van Swinderen’s lab is doing some interesting work on this, and he has discussed using ‘bottom-up’ modulators to investigate ‘top-down’ selective attention (which seems pretty key to subjective experience in humans). It is possible that novelty is analogous to positive reinforcement in some situations (like developmental learning) but I think Bruno would argue that it can be deeper, because it indicates the animal is actively engaged in learning new information about the world (and I’m sure he’d be happy to talk further on this if you’d like).
I hope to get to replying about navigation tomorrow :)