Abdai, Judit and Miklósi, Ádám (2023) After 150 years of watching: is there a need for synthetic ethology? ANIMAL COGNITION, 26. pp. 261-274. ISSN 1435-9448
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Abstract
The Darwinian idea of mental continuity is about 150 years old. Although nobody has strongly denied this evolutionary link, both conceptually and practically, relative slow advance has been made by ethology and comparative psychology to quantify mental evolution. Debates on the mechanistic interpretation of cognition often struggle with the same old issues (e.g., associationism vs cognitivism), and in general, experimental methods have made also relative slow progress since the introduction of the puzzle box. In this paper, we illustrate the prevailing issues using examples on ‘mental state attribution’ and ‘perspective taking” and argue that the situation could be improved by the introduction of novel methodological inventions and insights. We suggest that focusing on problem-solving skills and constructing artificial agents that aim to correspond and interact with biological ones, may help to understand the functioning of the mind. We urge the establishment of a novel approach, synthetic ethology, in which researchers take on a practical stance and construct artificial embodied minds relying of specific computational architectures the performance of which can be compared directly to biological agents.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | Comparative cognition, Synthetic ethology, Problem solving, Animal cognition |
Subjects: | Q Science / természettudomány > QL Zoology / állattan |
SWORD Depositor: | MTMT SWORD |
Depositing User: | MTMT SWORD |
Date Deposited: | 21 Sep 2023 13:27 |
Last Modified: | 21 Sep 2023 13:27 |
URI: | http://real.mtak.hu/id/eprint/174392 |
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