SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 2 - 4 may 2007
Symposium: Development and evolution of higher cognition in animals
Friday, 4 May 2007
Opening comment
Professor Lesley Rogers
I’d like to address the question that many people have asked me: what really is cognition? Obviously, I’ve only got a couple of minutes here and I would not be able to answer it even if I had more time, but in some senses the word has replaced the earlier-used word ‘intelligence’ in animals, because it seemed to be more objective. It could be debated whether it is, in fact, more objective.
Cognition is used to refer to neural processing of any kind in simple and complex nervous systems, but we have now introduced a distinction between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ cognition which makes things somewhat more difficult to define, or to say whether there is some sort of continuum or discrete difference. Where do we draw a line between the two? I can’t begin to answer that question, but maybe the speakers today will shed more light on that for each of us to consider. Here I simply want to say that I don’t think the distinction is between conscious and unconscious or subconscious thinking because, even in humans, quite complex thoughts can be subconscious. We are often not at all conscious of why we behave in certain ways or even exactly how we are behaving.
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The study of higher cognition in animals was precipitated by the work of Donald Griffin. In 1976 he published one book, The Question of Animal Awareness, and in 1984 another that is somewhat more widely read, Animal Thinking. When his views were first put forward they were met with considerable hostility, as well one might imagine because we were all brought up, as good students of animal behaviour, not to use anthropomorphic terms and not to consider that animals have any of the same sorts of thoughts and processes as humans might have.
But now, albeit somewhat slowly, this thinking by Don Griffin has precipitated a very active interest in the study of cognition in animals, and has taken us to where we are today with this particular symposium. Many of the most distinguished speakers in the field are here with us today – some of them having come considerable distances and I thank them for doing so.
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I think that the majority of our attitudes and the ways in which we treat animals are still determined by, or depend very much on, the divide that was set up originally by René Descartes and people around his time, which made an absolute division between humans and animals. And, despite the fact that things are beginning to change, it really is still largely the way we operate.
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We have in recent years constructed a list of various attributes, some of which I have listed here, by which we try to separate humans from animals. It may be a matter of degree rather than one of absoluteness, as we will also see today; nevertheless we still operate very much with that divide looming quite large in front of us.
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If we look at the Darwinian position of gradual evolution, we see that Darwin recognised that many of the emotions of animals are similar to some of those expressed by humans, and we do now give more credence to his views. But these are issues that we will have to grapple with very strongly in the years ahead, because our whole way of looking at animals and the way we treat them, both in research and in agriculture and so on, will be vastly influenced by the new research, some of which we will hear about today. Some of the most stunning studies will be presented by our distinguished speakers.
