Causal Cognition and Goal-directed Action
Speaker:
Tony Dickinson
Abstract:
I have long argued that the goal-directed action of non-human animals can be mediated by a form of practical inference that takes as one of its arguments a belief about the causal relationship between the action and its outcome. Two lines of evidence will be advanced to support this claim. The first is the concordance between the determinants of the acquisition of human causal beliefs and the performance of animal instrumental behaviour, especially under conditions that induce causal illusions. The second line of evidence comes from two empirical findings that are problematic for associative accounts of goal-directed action. The first is the claim by Blaisdell and colleagues (see Clayton & Dickinson, 2006) that rats will discount alternative causes of self-generated outcomes, whereas the second arises from the ability of food-caching Western Scrub-Jays to avoid searching in locations from which they have already recovered their caches (see Clayton et al, 2006).
Clayton, N., & Dickinson, A. (2006). Rational rats. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 472-474. (pdf)
Clayton, N. S., Emery, N., & Dickinson, A. (2006). The rationality of animal memory: Complex caching strategies of western scrub jays. In S. Hurley & M. Nudds (Eds.), rational animals? (pp. 197-216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (pdf)
