h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It looks like I have beaten the ACEs to your page! I myself am not a volunteer or trustee for the BBC, but I have been posting here pre-Rupert, so I could possibly be helpful to you, in a diffident, non-official way.



I like Steven Pinker's work, so I only know the rudiments of your subject. Are we talking Piaget, here? What kinds of representations do your cats make? I was intrigued to learn that cats have an egocentric viewpoint for orientation and pathfinding (in a book I read lately on the science of cats in general) because my bluepoint Siamese adore it when I reconfigure my apartment.

Thanks for the warm welcome. Piaget was a developmental psychologist interested in human development...which occasionally my area of study touches on, but not usually.

I study representations that are general to many or all vertebrates, and perhaps invertebrates as well. In particular, I use Pavlovian conditioning (e.g., a tone signaling the delivery of food, by which after a few pairings between the two, the rat comes to enter the feeding nich when it hears the tone) to study associative representations. That is, what is the content of learning during Pavlovian conditioning? It turns out (I love Adam's thoughts on this expression!) that rats, pigeons, and humans (and ergo, presumably cats and puppies and goldfish) learn more than simply THAT the tone predicts food. There is also good evidence now that they learn WHEN and WHERE food is expected to occur from the onset of the tone.

I am also studying how animals construct spatial maps, particularly allocentric maps. You refered to an egocentric map, which is the subject's representation of where it is in space relative to fixed objects in that space. An allocentric representation contains the spatial relationships (distances and directions) between separate entities "out there" in space. For example, no matter where we are, we know that the USA Capitol building is at the other end of the Mall from the Washington monument. In fact, these two structures share a specific, fixed spatial relationship to each other which becomes useful to us when we want to use one or both of these objects to navigate around Washington DC.

I am studying this in pigeons using a skinner box with a touch-screen equipped computer monitor. I can present visual "landmarks" on the screen (blue squres, green clovers, red stars...etc. [I sometimes jokingly call it my "lucky charms" experiment]) that share a fixed relationship to each other. For example, the blue square might always appear 12 cm to the left of the red star. Then, I train the pigeon to peck at a location on the screen that is 5 cm above the red star. Finally, I test the pigeon by presenting it with just the blue square. If the pigeon had encoded the spatial vector between the blue square and the red star and the spatial vector between the red star and the food goal (the location it pecked), then it might integrate those two representations (via the common element, the red star) and compute the novel vector (i.e., not experienced during any of its training phases) from the blue square to the food goal.

You can see reprints of some of these experiments on my web site (pigeonrat.psych.ucla.edu). The spatial intetgration experiment has just recently been submitted for publication, so it is not available to read yet.

Speaking of Siamese, I have a flamepoint Siamese, and I'm convinced (through experimental "horsing around") that he is hard of hearing and has poor night vision. Do you find evidence for similar deficits in your cat as well?

Thanks for the welcome!

You are welcome for the welcome!

I will check out pigeonrat....edu to see if I can understand any of it.



Oghma and Ganesh scoot rapidly around my apartment like mad at night, and I don't seem to hear crashes any more often after I have rearranged something. Neither one of them seems to like to navigate in total darkness. I know that experimentations with Siamese show that their eyes are cross-wired, compared to all other cats, so I have always expected mine to be a little 'retarded' that way. I know the more 'traditional applehead'ish of the two (Oghma) needs additional prompting to even see a fluffy mouse or fishingpole boa, smack dab in the middle of the day. Oghma also shows signs of the once-characteristic crooked tail so evident in the Disney movie Lady and The Tramp, (We are Siamese if you please, we are Siamese, if you DON'T please) which has been mostly bred out by now.

They both hear OK, but choose not to react sometimes. It think it's not because they aren't strongly food oriented, because I know they are! (Mine go for Nature's Recipe brand treats) I suspect they've got a certain non-learning threshhold. That is, if a positive reinforcement for something doesn't happen fairly soonish, in which soonish relates to how likely a behavior I want them to do matched what a cat is likely to do and has the equipment to do, they then become resistant to responding to the same training stimulus in the future. It is much easier to train them to stretch themselves with a legs-akimbo full out spinal curve (I've got Oghma adding a neck twist) than it is to get them to sit just so in the window sill, and it's easier to get them to do that than to get them to come on command.

I live near a street that is much too wide for it's traffic, which means there are a lot of nobody stopped at the octagonal accidents, and they both seem to hear them fine, and yelps from the country band boys next door also register on them just fine.

Oh yeah! There's a club on H2G2 for folk with animal nicknames. I think they call themselves a Zoo.

Sounds like your cats are pretty similiar to mine, except that they hear better. If I hide in a dark room and wait for him to try to find me, I can say his name at almost speaking level and he has a Dickin's of a time trying to pinpoint the source of that sound.

It is a pet theory of mine (pun intended) that Siamese cats (at least mine) are a lot like kids with ADHD.