(Apologies for the delayed response; I’ve been traveling the last few days.)
Again, thanks so much for the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments! My background is in philosophy, where the science of these issues gets handled at a rather superficial level, so it’s a pleasure to be able to correspond with someone with such a deep knowledge of the field.
The distinction between operant conditioning and operant conditioning with an unfamiliar action is somewhat arbitrary. We were trying to capture the fact that some types of learning require more cognitive flexibility than others. Perhaps the distinction between elemental and non-elemental learning is a more important one. There are probably a number of other important distinctions that I’ve either glossed over or just missed completely. I think it would be interesting to see a taxonomy of learning abilities and an analysis of which learning abilities give the strongest evidence for valenced experience. I certainly agree with you that contextual learning provides stronger evidence of cognitive flexibility than many other types of learning.
I’m interested to hear more about why you think novelty-seeking behavior might be evidence for the capacity for valenced experience. I suppose the fact that novelty salience can override innate preference is further evidence of behavioral plasticity. Is that what you had in mind or were you thinking of something more specific?
Definitely interested to hear your thoughts about navigation.
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 Gavin!
(Apologies for the delayed response; I’ve been traveling the last few days.)
Again, thanks so much for the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments! My background is in philosophy, where the science of these issues gets handled at a rather superficial level, so it’s a pleasure to be able to correspond with someone with such a deep knowledge of the field.
The distinction between operant conditioning and operant conditioning with an unfamiliar action is somewhat arbitrary. We were trying to capture the fact that some types of learning require more cognitive flexibility than others. Perhaps the distinction between elemental and non-elemental learning is a more important one. There are probably a number of other important distinctions that I’ve either glossed over or just missed completely. I think it would be interesting to see a taxonomy of learning abilities and an analysis of which learning abilities give the strongest evidence for valenced experience. I certainly agree with you that contextual learning provides stronger evidence of cognitive flexibility than many other types of learning.
I’m interested to hear more about why you think novelty-seeking behavior might be evidence for the capacity for valenced experience. I suppose the fact that novelty salience can override innate preference is further evidence of behavioral plasticity. Is that what you had in mind or were you thinking of something more specific?
Definitely interested to hear your thoughts about navigation.
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 :)