346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amongst themselves. I talk with anthropologist and cognitive scientist Erica Cartmill about modes of play and other social behaviors among various species, and what they reveal about the ways we all think. Upgrade your denim game with Rag & Bone! Get 20% off sitewide with code MINDSCAPE at www.rag-bone.com https://www.rag-bone.com/. #ragandbonepod Get twenty percent off your first purchase at Fast Growing Trees https://www.fast-growing-trees.com/ when using the code MINDSCAPE at checkout. Henson Shaving is offering 100 blades free with the purchase of a razor — just head to hensonshaving.com/MINDSCAPE https://hensonshaving.com/MINDSCAPE and or use code MINDSCAPE at checkout. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/09/346-erica-cartmill-on-how-human-and-animal-minds-think-and-play/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Erica Cartmill received her Ph. D. in psychology and neuroscience from the University of St. Andrews. She is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Animal Behavior, Psychology, and Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the co-chair of the EVOLANG conferences and the co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. She is co-director of the Possible Minds lab https://www.possibleminds.org/ at IU, and also manages the Observing Animals https://www.observinganimals.org/ project, which asks for public input on how animals interact with each other. Web site https://www.comparelab.org/team Indiana University we page https://anthropology.indiana.edu/about/faculty/cartmill-erica.html Google Scholar publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4JiaMaUAAAAJ&hl=en

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:56Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the topics that we've talked about frequently on the podcast is the nature of intelligence, especially, of course, because we're thinking these days about artificial intelligence. Is that a good label? At what point are AI programs counting as intelligence? But even when you put that aside, just thinking about human intelligence and other intelligences in the natural world, there are certainly senses in which human beings as a species are different than other species. We're the only species that has podcasts and invented calculus and things like that.

• 1:36Sean Carroll?

  But is that a single fundamental difference between human beings and other species? Or is it an accumulation of many things? Or is it just something that we got there first in some sense? Different aspects of humanity have been suggested as the origin of our differences. Tool use, language use, maybe even how we speak, and the shape of our throats and esophaguses, sheer brain power, number of neurons, social organization, but none of it's

• 2:10Sean Carroll?

  Seems to be quite the thing that tells the difference. So obviously, one attack, one strategy to think about this question is to better understand animals and what they can do, how they are similar to human beings, how they are different than human beings, et cetera. And not just in intelligence, because intelligence is not just one thing. There's different ways to be intelligent, different skills you can have. And also, there are other aspects of social life that are related to intelligence, but not exactly the same thing. Today's guest, Erica Cartmill, is an anthropologist, cognitive scientist, and also animal behavior scientist, an interdisciplinary person.

• 2:52Sean Carroll?

  And she studies different aspects of animal behavior and intelligence, in particular, the idea of animals playing with each other, animals teasing each other, animals having a sense of humor. This might seem like a kind of simple and trivial thing at first, but when you think about it, the idea of telling a joke, as we do for human beings, is a pretty sophisticated idea. It's a social construct in some ways, because when you tell a joke, you're setting things up, which gives people, your listeners, your audience, expectations, and then you subvert the expectations at the end. So that's actually a kind of a subtle move for an intelligent creature to make.

• 3:36Sean Carroll?

  Certainly, dogs and cats and things like that play with us, you know, they play fetch or whatever. But do they invent games? Do they play with each other in ways that have roles, like pitcher and catcher, that you could then switch sides and things like that? Does it evolve out of aggression? Is it the same as aggression? Is it different? Do they do it just for fun? Or is there some down-to-earth, practical reason for fetching balls and things like that? So these are all fascinating questions, and... Unsurprisingly, the scientists who've studied them have discovered a lot of fascinating things. And as always, from my perspective, when I have these kinds of conversations, I'm both struck by how similar we are to different species in various ways and how

• 4:21Sean Carroll?

  different. You know, human beings put things together in a certain way while sharing many, many of the same traits with individual other species. But there's a lot we still don't know about human beings and other animals. So let's go.

• 4:52Sean Carroll?

  Erica Cartmill, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me, Sean. It's great to be here.

• 4:57Sean Carroll?

  So one of the questions that comes immediately to mind, and I'm going to apologize from the start, because this is one of those, "Do you think I'm right?" kinds of questions. But in reading your stuff and in talking to other people, comparing the intelligence and the capacities of other species to humans, one thing, I mean, it might have been natural to think that there is a linear progression of intelligence and other species are just not as intelligent as us. And, you know, they're, you can relate them to, oh, they're at a two-year-old human level of intelligence or something like that. But what I'm actually getting from your stuff and others is there's just some ways in which they're more intelligent than us, some ways in which they're vastly less. It's just like a lot of different capacities that don't necessarily march in lockstep with each other.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yes, you're right. Moving on.

• 5:44Sean Carroll?

  Oh, good.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  No, I'm just kidding. No, I think that's exactly right. You know, there used to be this kind of model of, you know, intelligence, but also just kind of evolution, the scala natura. I know you know about that, right? Where you think, where it's sort of, the idea was humans were on top and other animals could be arranged, kind of working up towards the perfection that was human beings.

• 6:07Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  And, you know, I think what science has done over the last, well, really many decades is tried to really break that apart and say it's not a linear progression towards Humans are equally as evolved as every other species. And so the things that humans have evolved to be good at are, you know, helping humans fit into the social and ecological niches that we have. But the same is true of every other species. And so you wouldn't expect humans to, you know, be able to fly or echolocate or see in the dark as well as some other species. And so why do we think about cognitive capacities as still being the sort of linear progression?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  And I think the way I like to think about it or talk about it is I think that what humans have is a unique constellation of abilities. Some of those abilities are more developed than other species. Some are less developed. But what we really have is this unique configuration, this unique constellation that pulls them together in a way that that really helps them build on each other and gives us something that is really powerful and allows us to do all of the things we do as a species.

• 7:14Sean Carroll?

  But it just makes it so hard to have like a nice tidy narrative about our superiority this way.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  It is, it is difficult. It's true.

• 7:23Sean Carroll?

  And it's also, you know, it makes it, I guess, more work for you folks who are studying this thing because there's not one magic thing that makes humans different. It's, you know, we're one among many and we're all different in different ways.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's tricky, right? Because so one of the things, I started out studying language and, you know, that was really always the like bulwark of humanity, right? Humans have language, other animals don't have language. But when you really start breaking down, well, what do we mean by language? Is it syntax? Is it, you know, reference? Is it compositionality? You know, the ability to put together small units into bigger units that have different meanings? All of these, each of these things, when you look at a very specific feature of language, you can find at least one other species that has that ability.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  But what, but what we can't find, or, you know, and I don't think we will find, is another species that has all of those abilities. And so I think that's what I really mean when I say humans have a unique constellation. Is that we put together all of the pieces in a way that give us something that, you know, might in fact be qualitatively different. Although it isn't. It isn't just, you know, a sort of single switch that gets flipped on and says, "Oh, we have language, other animals don't." It's that, you know, other animals have pieces, they have, you know, they might have one thing better than we do, they might have little pieces, you know, partial pieces of other things. But, you know, we, we kind of have this, you know, all the pieces fit together into this puzzle for us.

• 9:00Sean Carroll?

  I would love it if you could explain this example that you actually showed in a talk that I saw you give on YouTube, I didn't see the whole thing, but it was a chimp doing a, a task where there were numbers flashed on the screen and then it was supposed to remember the order they were in. And the chimpanzee was better at this than human beings were, and it was kind of embarrassing for the human beings. Could you explain this experiment?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is actually an experiment done in Kyoto, at the primate institute there, where chimpanzee, her name is Ai, and she was really the first one who was trained to do this, where she's trained to sequence numbers. And so, the numbers, so it's something where you have to train her slowly over time, but the eventual version of the task is the numbers, one through nine flash up on the screen, she sees them, and then as soon as she, her, her task is to press the numbers in order. And as soon as she presses the first one, they all disappear, they get masked, and so she can't see where they are. And so you kind of have to look very quickly, you know, form a mental image of where they

• 10:07Speaker 03

  are and the order in which you need to touch them, and then, you know, very quickly, you have to keep that in your, in what's called your working memory, sort of your short-term memory that, you know, allows you to continue the task that you're in the middle of. Now, Ai proved to be very, very good at this task, much better than untrained adults, human adults. And so we actually run, this task is something that's up on the computer screens in the chimpanzee exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo. Chris Martin is the, the research director at the zoo there, who had worked with chimpanzee Ai on some of the

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Studies installed these for the zoo visitors and it's very humbling for them to go and and try it themselves because you know they see it and they're like, oh, cool, I'm gonna try this and then they see a chimp doing it and they're like, oh, I can beat the chimp and a human has never beaten beaten I. However, if you take very young children and you kind of give them, it doesn't even have to be very young children, but if you if you take someone and you slowly train them up, you can get to the point where you become an expert at this. So really what we're doing is kind of an unfair comparison because we're taking I, a chimpanzee expert, and you know, sort of having her compete against human novices. But one thing that that I know this is a little bit off topic, but I actually think

• 11:32Speaker 03

  it's really interesting and important from a cognitive perspective is that numerosity, the ability to kind of learn, understand and manipulate numbers is something that seems to differ quite a bit, or in particular ways between humans and other great apes. So one of the very interesting things with chimpanzees is that they can learn to recognize and to sequence numbers, you know, one through nine, and I think the video I showed, and I know I can now go up into the teens. But teaching her a new number is just as difficult as teaching her the last number. So learning three is just as hard as learning two, learning

• 12:15Speaker 03

  five is just as hard as learning four. And that's very different from what happens with humans. So in human children, there's this period of sort of slow, laborious development between one, between learning one, the number one, the number two, and the number three. But then, once they learn four, or maybe five, then they suddenly get it and they realize that each new number is exactly one number higher than the number before it. It's called, it's called learning the cardinal sequence, the cardinal number principle. And so that's something where understanding that underlying pattern and being able to apply it to new examples, new numbers, is something that humans, you know, at at some

• 12:57Speaker 03

  point, kind of figure out and have this aha moment. And that chimpanzees don't seem to learn that underlying pattern in the same way, even though if they're trained on each of these different numbers, they can become incredibly proficient at recognizing and sequencing them.

• 13:15Sean Carroll?

  Can chimpanzees do simple arithmetic? Can they add?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting. I mean, this is not my particular area of expertise. I haven't done these experiments myself. My, my understanding is that a number of different species can. And when I say, you know, species, I'm including, you know, mostly mammals, but sometimes also birds and also pre-linguistic human children. I know they're not a different species, but you know, when we're talking about the kinds of tasks you run with animals, we often run very similar tasks with, they're not, because they're non-verbal tasks and we have to run very similar tasks with young kids.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  So the tasks that measure, I say addition and subtraction are not, you know, the number four plus the number five equals the number nine, right? Because they're not manipulating symbols in that way, but it would be showing a quantity for going, you know, say you have four balls and they go behind a screen and then you have five balls and they go behind the same screen and then the screen is raised up. Now, what you want to show in, say, you know, a baby watching this or an orangutan watching this is when the screen goes up, if there are only three balls behind the screen, it should be surprising, right? Because that's, that's a violation of the additive principle.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  And so that is in fact what you often see with the species that have been tested. Now, there, there are some other things, again, math is not really my area of expertise, but there are, you know, some other differences where, you know, the kind of how far apart the numbers are before animals will recognize them seems to matter. So like it's difficult without being able to explicitly count, say recognizing seven versus eight is very difficult. Because you have what's called a, a large approximate number system. And that's true both for young human children and for other species.

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• 16:53Sean Carroll?

  But there's this, if I'm understanding correctly, yeah. So like, other great apes can understand quantities, and maybe even addition of quantities, but there is some level of abstraction that they're not quite reaching with what you and I would think of as addition, and I guess the successor operation from one number to another.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's fair. It might be that some great apes who have been symbol trained can do simple arithmetic with manipulating symbols. But that's not, as far as I know, that is, you know, that would be a real exception.

• 17:35Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, okay. And how well do we understand the explanations for these differences in terms of like, what evolution is asking of us? Can we tell stories? I don't know how testable the stories would be about why chimps are good at some things and less good at others.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, it's difficult because of course, in some ways, it is just, you know, storytelling, right? We can make, we can generate lots of hypotheses about why humans are good at particular things. There are lots of hypotheses about why, you know, why humans have language, why we have particular forms of language. Ultimately, it's very difficult to test those, right? Is it, we can ask things like, well, is the structure of human language linked to our ability to see hierarchy in the steps of producing

• 18:35Speaker 03

  a tool, right? So there are a lot of theories about, say, you know, tool production or material culture and the fact that it has, you know, nested hierarchies of you have to do this before you do this, but you have to keep the end goal in mind in order to structure the intermediate goals. And that's very similar to structuring a sentence. So there are interesting theories about sort of dating the, the evolution of fully structured human language. And I say that, you know, maybe connect it to the emergence of certain kinds of stone tools. So we know that like apes can make tools, but they can't

• 19:15Speaker 03

  make the, you know, the very complex, they're called Ashulian stone tools, where it's not just flaking off a single edge, but it's flaking a shape to make a kind of prototype base shape and then making secondary flakes to give it, you know, a sharp edge on one side and not on the other, or, you know, kind of modifications on top of modifications. And it's that kind of, you know, future thinking and planning that some people think is, is a marker, that species that could do that, also probably could structure complete sentences.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  But, you know, at the end of the day, all we can really do is say, can other species of great apes that are alive today, understand and appreciate structural differences in, in, you know, human sentences? So there's our studies with trying to teach great apes' language and asking, do they understand the difference between the dog chased the cat and the cat chased the dog? And you know, you can also ask, did they understand, you know, how to plan for future events and how to order different

• 20:37Speaker 03

  sort of intermediate steps and things. And so I think, you know, that's really where a lot of the the work on comparative cognition, looking at, looking across different ape species and saying, you know, well, not just what do these species do in the wild today, but what are their underlying cognitive abilities? If they're put in the right, and I don't mean right in that there's, you know, one correct situation, but if they're put in, you know, a similar situation, given access to the same kinds of substrates and motivations, can they, you know, complete a task in the same way? Can they understand particular sequences or orders?

• 21:19Speaker 03

  You know, is there, is there structure to the way they think?

• 21:24Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. And among, I presume I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you because you're the actual expert, among the different kinds of great apes, the gorillas, the chimpanzees, orangutans, the bonobos, are they, are there like, again, unequal capacities there? Some of them are better than others, but worse at other tasks? Do we, how much do we know about that?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, just like I was saying with comparing humans to other species, comparing across the great apes, you know, I think really yields a, a picture of, of different areas of excellence, if you will. So, you know, I, I think it used to be the case that people would think that chimpanzees and bonobos, who are the most closely related to humans, maybe were the most sophisticated cognitively.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  What they are is very good at particular kinds of cognitive tasks. They are the most social of the great apes, so they live in large, multi-male, multi-female groups, as humans do. And they, you know, just like us, they're interested in gossip. They are really, you know, they're very interested in paying attention closely to who's doing what with whom, when. And so any things that have to do with paying attention to others' motivations, paying attention to

• 22:45Speaker 03

  You know, what information others may be keeping from you. These are things where chimpanzees and bonobos really excel because those are are things that, you know, are important in the, you know, their natural environments. Now orangutans, which is the species I started out studying, they spend a lot of time, the vast majority of their time, in a semi solitary state. So males in the wild will are solitary. They have large home ranges, they range around, they look for females to mate with, but they don't spend social time with others outside of courting a female. Females will have an infant and then, you know, who grows into a juvenile and they will

• 23:28Speaker 03

  have, you know, one baby at a time who they travel around with and spends all and they spend all their time together. And that is true for 10 to 12 years. And so they have, you know, they're so it's a mother infant pair, travels around and then when the mother has a new infant, the older offspring, you know, is displaced and and kind of goes off to to find their own way in life. They go to college, if you will. Empty nest. And so, yeah. And and so that kind of, you know, what sometimes people call like Machiavellian intelligence, you know, thinking about like who's, you know, who's plotting against me, who do I

• 24:10Speaker 03

  need to make friends with in order to overthrow the king, things like that. Those those types of intelligence are are not areas where orangutans, you know, really need to use those skills in their in their natural environment. They, I mean, they are social, they do, you know, they can, you know, pay attention to what another's goals are. I mean, they're not. They're not completely solitary individuals, so I don't mean to give that impression, but they're not as intensely obsessed with others as bonobos and chimpanzees are. What orang- where orangutans really seem to excel is in material culture, material manipulation.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  So they are very good at figuring out manual tasks. And they also, so I've worked mostly with orangutans and now with bonobos and chimpanzees, and they have, they also have very difference, different sort of levels of, of energy and very different kind of personality types. So if you give them a problem to solve, an orangutan will sit there and they'll stare at it for a long time. And they'll kind of, you know, they might chew on something, they're just kind of looking at it, they might move a little bit, look at it from the side, but they're kind of just sitting there. And then eventually they will get up and go over, and they might solve it in the first time, first try. They might not, but you know, they're, they're really kind of, they give it some space and

• 25:39Speaker 03

  then they give it a shot. And chimpanzees and bonobos, you present them with something and they immediately want to get their hands on it. They're like, what's this? I'm gonna go over here, I'm gonna poke it, I'm gonna shove it, I'm gonna shake it, I'm gonna bang it up and down, look at me! And, you know, those, I think, are really differences in that kind of like underlying motivation that can lead to different conclusions about cognition, but really have more to do with kind of an orientation towards the world, you know, than they do, and maybe an orientation that's driven by your social world. You know, if you, if you're a chimpanzee or a bonobo and you have an opportunity to, you know, try to get a piece of food, if you're not there immediately, you know, you

• 26:23Speaker 03

  might not get it, someone's gonna get to it before you, right? If you think about, I don't know if you remember this, like, old, you know, Campbell's Soup commercial where they pass the bowl down the, the table, and it's like from the older kid to the middle kid, to the younger middle kid, and it's like it gets all the way to the, you know, youngest one, he's like, wait, there's chicken in here? You know, it's like, now with chicken noodle soup, now with more chicken. And you know, it's that kind of like if you live in a big social world where you're not the one who gets to eat first, you better get in there when the getting's good. And so, you know, I think some of these things about the the social and physical environments that species have have, you know, been adapted to live in can really sort of change the

• 27:04Speaker 03

  way that they, um, you know, the the way they're inclined to engage with, um, with the tasks that we as scientists give them.

• 27:13Sean Carroll?

  As a physicist, I got to think that the orangutans are just theorists and the chimpanzees are experimenters, right? They're in there, they want to knock things around and see what the data are going to tell them.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's that that's very fair.

• 27:26Sean Carroll?

  The other thing I saw in the same video that I was talking about before that really struck me, you had, I didn't see the whole thing, so I'm not quite sure how it developed, but there was a question about whether chimpanzees can recognize what it means when a human being points at a certain kind of box. And someone asks, well, do chimpanzees themselves ever point like that to indicate things? And your answer was something like, no, because if chimpanzees have a resource like food, they want to keep it for themselves. They don't ever want to tell anyone else where it is.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and that is more or less what, you know, what people have found. So that, you know, I think for a long time, um, scientists argued that humans were the only species that pointed, and particularly the only ape that pointed, because, you know, most of the comparisons about language are between humans and other apes. Although, of course, there are very interesting other kinds of models, like in birds and cetaceans, you know, dolphins and whales. But the point in question, um, I think is, is a very interesting one that changes depending on the environment that the that the ape is in. And so when,

• 28:42Speaker 03

  when apes are in, uh, in human care, in situations where, you know, they, um,

• 28:51Speaker 03

  They are prevented from reaching things themselves due to physical barriers that the humans put up, like say in a zoo. They they can pretty easily learn to indicate to someone a thing that is out of their reach that they would like.

• 29:08Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And the human will give it to them. Now, is that pointing? It certainly looks like it, right? You can extend an arm towards a thing. There was a lot of, you know, nitty gritty discussion about, well, are they pointing with an index finger? Are they just, is it a modified reach? Are they maybe just reaching to get it? But sometimes the thing is really far away or, you know, so I'm I'm not convinced that they're just reaching. I do, in fact, think they're pointing. And actually, if you look across human societies, humans point in all kinds of different ways. So, you know, there it's not just that we use this extended index finger. We all, you know, there are places where you point with two fingers or a whole hand. Actually, people get trained in in Disney parks to not point with a finger, with a

• 29:52Speaker 03

  single finger, because it's considered rude in some cultures. There's also, you know, some societies where people point with their chin by stretching their chin towards something or inclining their head. And if you think about it, you might do the same thing if, say, you were carrying something and someone asked you for directions and you might, you know, incline your head and say, oh, yeah, it's over that way.

• 30:11Sean Carroll?

  But is there also a feeling that humans are more sort of cooperative slash trusting in their ways of dealing with the world? Like, we we sort of rely on other people to cooperate with us to find things in ways that, I don't know, either chimpanzees or any other great apes are sort of more self-reliant?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think, you know, human society, I mean, it's for all of our, you know, not great traits as a species. And as much as, you know, we have liars and cheaters and, you know, things like that that appear in news stories and, right? Humans are fundamentally a cooperative species. We share information with others that doesn't benefit us. Sometimes it disadvantages us, right? If someone says, You know, hey, what, uh, you know, what's going on or like what, you know, what are you standing in line for? Like, why would you tell them? Like, this might be something where I

• 31:11Speaker 03

  just want this myself, right? Or someone asks you, where's the best noodle place in, you know, in Poughkeepsie? And, you know, why would you tell them? Because you want more noodles for yourself, right? But these are things where, you know, we will stop and help people we're not related to. We will share information freely, and that information is rarely a lie. I mean, it is obviously sometimes. People are very capable of lying. But if you look at the average person and the average interaction, people are very trusting. And, you know, and I think that that's one of the, the real hallmarks of our species is that, you know, we, in fact, that's one of the things that makes language

• 31:53Speaker 03

  work, is, you know, the ability of both the person who's speaking and the person who's listening to trust that the other one is, you know, communicating in good faith, right? If you tell me something, I don't immediately, you know, not every time, anyway, I don't immediately say, uh, prove it, right? Because we're, if, in order to talk about things that, you know, that, that we talk about, that can't be, that aren't just in the here and now, you have to believe the other individual. And so this entire enterprise of, I mean, you know, podcasting, for example, right? I mean, that's, that is not something that

• 32:35Speaker 03

  I think any other species could do. That doesn't mean that they couldn't, that they can't communicate at a distance, right? So chimpanzees make long calls, orangutans make, you know, orangutans make long calls, lots of species make alarm calls, birds have, you know, these territorial displays, anything that's broadcast, right? It's out there for others to listen to. But it, it oftentimes is linked to the, you know, the specific information about the time and place and the, and the speaker, or, you know, the Signaller, right? So if if a bird is giving a territorial display, you're and you hear it,

• 33:20Speaker 03

  you know, something about, you know, who they are, where they are. These are actually really, and this is a little bit off topic, but it's actually one of my absolute favorite studies that I always teach in animal cognition. Where song sparrows were, so song sparrows are have very discreet territories. And one of the, I think, neatest experiments that shows that animals encode information, not just about sort of the type of call, but who is making the call? And where they're making the call from is that if you take, if you take a call made by,

• 34:06Speaker 03

  say, the neighbor on the right-hand side, right, like a right-hand territory. So you think about, you know, you live in a house and you have a neighbor on the right and neighbor on the left. So if you take a call from the neighbor on the right and you play it back, but from the left, the birds will respond, the bird in the middle will respond very strongly because it's like, wait, Fred's in the wrong place.

• 34:26Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  And they'll respond, you know, as basically as if Fred's a stranger. But if you play Fred's call back from where it's supposed to be, they don't respond or they don't respond as strongly because that's what they're used to hearing. And right. And so I think it's really interesting that, you know, it's not just that animals are recognizing, oh, this is an alarm, or, you know, this is a food call, but they're they're processing information and comparing it to their memory of who is is providing that information and where is that information coming from? And yeah, so I think that that's, I think that animal communication is is both different from human language, but also more often more complex than we think it is.

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• 37:36Sean Carroll?

  Well, it leads right into where I wanted to go next, which was the idea of roles as an understood concept in animal societies, if you can even call them societies. Like presumably, there's definitely cases where there's two animals and one sort of is dominant over the other. But to what extent do different species have well-defined niches that individuals play? Like obviously insects have biological differences. One is a queen, one is a worker. But just culturally, how obvious is that notion in primates, for example?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it differs a lot between species. You know, more broadly across the animal kingdom, I think you have some colony, animals that live in colonies, like say meerkats or chimney swifts. Or, you know, again, these sort of animals that live in a group where you have multiple generations in the same group. In some of those species, there will be a single breeding pair. And so in that way, and you know, everyone else is kind of helping, right? And so in that way, it's sort of similar to a eusocial insect, like a honeybee, in that there's one, you know, quote unquote, queen.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  They're not as physiologically different as the queen bee is, but the dominant female will suppress reproduction in the younger or subordinate females. And so you do, I think, have some of these structures when it comes to mating structure in... Non-human primates, um, I think, I mean, you certainly have social hierarchies. Uh, again, depending on the species, I don't want to sort of overgeneralize too much. But, um, you know, you, some species have very strict dominance hierarchies in either the males or the females or both. So in some species, you can have a hierarchy where it's mixed genders and females can be mixed in there with males.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  You have some where it's all the males, but there's a strict order of males and then all the females below all the males. Um, uh, you can have, you know, sort of, um, distinct rights and responsibilities, if you will. Oh, yeah. Uh, that are, um, afforded to the dominant individual. And so it's not just, say, mating privileges, right? So some species, you might have, you know, the dominant male is like allowed to mate with all of the females, um, whereas the subordinate males are only allowed to mate with other females if the dominant male sort of allows them.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  And I don't mean, you know, gives him a written pass, like a hall pass, but, you know, uh, sort of like observes the male courting another female and doesn't attack him. Right. And so you can have alliances that are formed and it's like, well, if I'm the dominant male, I can mate with all the females and maybe I let a couple of my good friends mate with a few of the females, but maybe not my favorite female. Um, so that you do have these kind of, um, again, very complicated social rules. Um, what you don't have is you don't have a division of labor where, you know, some are collecting fruits and some are weaving baskets and some are collecting water.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Um, you, you know, you do have, um, some division in terms of hunting. So in, in, um, primate species like chimpanzees that hunt, you will have some individuals that, which is usually the males, but a few females as well, who will go on hunts together. And they will hunt usually for monkeys, but other. Species too, and they will, tends to be the same individuals that will go on hunting parties. And then they come back and they will share the meat with favored individuals. So they'll share it with their friends, males will share it with females that they're courting. And so, you know, meat is a very, you know, sort of precious resource, it's high calorie

• 41:49Speaker 03

  content. And so it's something that, you know, is used a little bit like a currency in, in species that, that hunt and then food share.

• 42:00Sean Carroll?

  So I can imagine if I'm a chimp or whatever, knowing my place in the hierarchy, I mean, how much do primates know about the relative hierarchy of other members of their group?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, quite a bit. There's some really beautiful experiments done, I think originally by Robert, Robert Safar and Dorothy Cheney at the University of Pennsylvania, but some others have since then, where you can simulate hierarchy reversals by playing back, you know, simulated calls. So you can play, you know, so let's say you have a fight where one, where one individual is giving like aggression calls and one individual is screaming, you know, having sort of victim screams, and then maybe afterwards does some submissive vocalizations to sort of show,

• 42:57Speaker 03

  you know, yes, you're in charge, I, I yield. And, right, uncle, uncle. And so, in, so what you can do is if you record those, you can then cut them up. So you have, you know, you have a call from, from, you know, individual A, who's maybe an aggressive call, a call from individual B, a call from individual C, and maybe those are, that's the order, A, B, and C. Right, so A is the dominant, B is in the middle, and C is lower down. Now, if you take, if you take those calls and you splice them together to create a,

• 43:41Speaker 03

  a simulated fight, where say C is attacking and beats A.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And then play that recording back to other individuals in the group. They will be very surprised. So, one, they will look longer at the speaker. And then, two, they will show more aggression to A afterwards. Because this is sort of a moment where they say, wait a second, A is vulnerable. And so, this is, maybe this is my chance to improve my spot in the hierarchy. And so, they're really paying attention to, you know, not just to their relationships with others, but to others' relationships to, you know, each other. Because those are the kinds of things that you need to know if you want to get ahead, right?

• 44:32Speaker 03

  If you want to have mating opportunities, it's really important, and if you're male, it's really important that you make friends with other males who are going to be in power, if not now, then in the future. If you're a female and you want to make sure that your, you know, your offspring are protected and they're not subject to, say, infanticide if, you know, a new male comes into power, you need to have strong relationships, not just with other females who could, you know, come to your aid and help protect your infant, but with other males who, in the future, may one day take over, right? And so, it's, it's very strategic. You know, it's, it definitely needs like an HBO show.

• 45:16Sean Carroll?

  It sounds like it. It makes me wonder, do animals have a sense of humor?

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Well, it's certainly something that, that I have been fascinated with for a long time and something that, you know, I've been, have been exploring, really, over the last five years. I've been trying to figure out whether, well, particularly great apes have, yeah, have a sense of humor, have a sort of understanding of, of surprise, or, you know, sort of these subversive moments. And I think, you know, this kind of comes out of, of the things that they pay attention to in their natural interactions.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  But, yeah, we've actually been, been working on an entire research line looking at humor, but really through the lens of what I call playful teasing.

• 46:12Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  So teasing is something that I think is a fascinating opportunity to to look at the social minds of animals because it's this gray area. It's sort of right in between aggression and play. And so a lot of times people, when, you know, I think when people talk about teasing and the way teasing has been studied in the past in animals, anyway, it has really been thought about as a form of aggression, right? I'm I'm pestering someone, I'm bothering them, I'm, you know, doing something to try to improve my stance in the group. It's sort of a like low

• 46:54Speaker 03

  level form of aggression. But if you look at humans, we use, we use teasing all the time in positive ways as well as negative ways. And so I think also when people talk about teasing in humans, it has, you know, has a pretty bad rap because it gets, it gets, you know, thought about as a precursor to bullying. And obviously, sometimes it is, you know, I don't mean to say all teasing is positive. But some forms of teasing, I think, are actually very loving. I think they build relationships. I think they're critical in, you know, in developing this sort of complex

• 47:33Speaker 03

  understanding of your, you know, how far another individual will go for you.

• 47:44Sean Carroll?

  Is there, so I mean, so the short answer is yes. You think that animals do have a sense of humor? Or is that pushing it? Is that anthropomorphizing too much?

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I mean, I certainly think that they, well, it's also hard when you just say animals, Sean.

• 48:01Sean Carroll?

  You're allowed to narrow it down. You're allowed to change any question I ask into the question you want to answer.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Because I will tell you, I think some animals have a sense of humor. I think some animals probably don't. So for example, right now, I, so I'm doing some wildlife rehabilitation, and I have a possum, who is an unreleasable, he's an educational animal. And he, you know, was like, has a disability that means he can't be released. And he is a fascinating animal. And I love possums. I could talk about them all day. But

• 48:37Speaker 03

  He does not, I do not think that he has a sense of humor. Is very good at what he does. He kind of like Pac-Man's around and eating things and, you know, like he'll cuddle, he's very sweet, but I do not think there's a whole lot going on upstairs. Not to put animals on a ladder, you know, again, but I, I think that is not an ability that I think needed to evolve for his species to survive. Whereas we also have a cat and a dog. I know you have two cats and I, I certainly think that, that cats and dogs have a sense of humor in a way. I certainly think that they have things that they know they're not supposed to do,

• 49:22Speaker 03

  that they enjoy doing because it gets a reaction. And I think that that pushing the boundaries and, you know, having these moments of something unexpected or a violation of a social norm or an explicit rule, I think those are the things that are really at the, at the heart of humor.

• 49:46Sean Carroll?

  Well, that, I'm glad you put it that way. It's very helpful because my current cats actually don't do this, but I used to own a cat who did the traditional cat behavior of, you know, sitting on a table or a cabinet and knocking something off. But she would do it in a very specific way and I swear I'm not hallucinating. She would move the thing toward the edge and then she would stop and look at you. Like, are you gonna stop me? And like, no, okay, you wanna move it closer? Stop and look at you and then eventually push it off. And I, as a human being, I wanna interpret that exactly the way that you just licensed me to do, that she was clearly demanding attention, annoying me purposefully, and that could be interpreted as a kind of a sense of humor, even maybe kind of a mean spirited one.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, I think I think it's a very valid question of, you know, what I mean, is all humor at its heart being spirited? Yeah, exactly. Um, but I mean, certainly when I started this project, um, I, I had, I thought that my husband and his brother were very mean to each other. And I was just like, I'm an only child. I grew up in a family that did not tease, um, or, you know, didn't kind of tease to a great extent. And, um, my husband is one of five boys and there was a lot of teasing in that family. Not gonna escape it, yeah. And, yeah, and I think like, you know, I, when I saw him and, and his younger brother

• 51:17Speaker 03

  get together and it was just, you know, how can I get under your skin until it really irritates you? And I have, I have to say, like, doing this, uh, conducting this, this line of research in great apes has made me develop a much greater appreciation for like the love that they have between them. Right. Um, I'm still not sure I'm gonna fully participate in that level of how can I, you know, irritate you? But, um, but I, you know, I do think that it's fundamentally built on, on respect and trust. Um, you know, coming back to this example you gave about your cat with the, you know, I'm gonna look at you and just push it a little closer. Oh, oh, maybe I'll wait. Oh, I'm gonna push a little more.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Oh, are you coming close? Oh, now, right? Um, so there's a, um, I think one of the things that started this whole project was, um, a, uh, we were looking for three different, um, behaviors that a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, Vasu Reddy, um, Had identified in human infants. So she called them not humor per se, but she called them clowning behaviors. So they were sort of nonverbal forms of humor. And these behaviors were offer and withdrawal. So, you know, here, would you like this thing? Ha, ha, just kidding.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Disrupting others' activities. So you're doing something and I come and jump in the middle of it, or, you know, make it impossible for you to do the thing you're doing. And then the one with my favorite all time label, which is provocative noncompliance. I think that cats are masters of provocative noncompliance. But you think about, you know, and so does that mean they have a sense of humor? I mean, I would like to leave the door open for that, but not have a strong conclusion. I mean, I think that, I would say it suggests that they have an appreciation for violating others' rules in that way. But I think it needs systematic exploration in, you know, a sort of scientifically objective

• 53:30Speaker 03

  way where we're saying, well, will they do it when someone is out of the room? You know, they do it in the same way. Are they really looking at your response? Are they trying to get a particular kind of response? So if you, you know, put yourself in the sort of role of an experimenter for a moment, and you said, well, when they do that, I'm going to turn and walk out of the room. Is that something where they're suddenly not going to be interested? Right? Are they doing it in order to get a response from you?

• 53:59Sean Carroll?

  But I love the connection with violating expectations. It's almost, I mean, maybe this is pushing too far, but I'm a theorist by inclination. So you can imagine that this kind of behavior grows into telling jokes, which I presume that anyway, cats don't do. Maybe chimpanzees do.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I do think that this violation of expectation is really at the heart of what a joke is, right? I mean, I think, of course, we can push jokes, you know, as humans, we push them to the extreme and we tell these long and complicated jokes and, you know, but I think fundamentally, a joke is, you know, setting up an expectation and then violating it in some way. And that was actually the thing that initiated this entire project for me was when I was, so I completed my dissertation studying gestural communication in orangutans. So went to zoos in the UK and Europe, and I was looking at how orangutans used gesture to communicate with each other. And during that study, I had this, I witnessed this

• 55:04Speaker 03

  interaction that I had no idea how to study from a gestural perspective, but I just thought it was fascinating and it kind of stayed with me. And I came back to it, you know, more years later than I would care to admit without giving away my age, when I had the opportunity to apply for a grant in this space. And so in this interaction, there was an infant orangutan who was hanging from a rope over her mother. And she had a stick in her hand, I think it was a piece of bamboo. And she reached down and sort of offered it towards her mother. Her mother reached her, her mother was lying on the ground on her back. And mother reached up and started to grab, reach for the stick,

• 55:47Speaker 03

  and then the infant pulled it back out of her reach and the mother put her hand down. Hilarious. Right. And I was like, oh, haha, right. And then the infant did it again. And the mother reached and the infant pulled it back. And then the infant did it again. And I just thought, oh, this is a cute little sort of game. And the mother is like tolerating the infant. But then what I thought was really, it was even more interesting was that at some point, the infant dropped the stick and seemed to get tired of the game. And then the mother picked it up and started doing it back to the infant. And so, you know, to me, that moment, that role reversal Yeah. really demonstrated that it wasn't sort of an idiosyncratic

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Routine that developed between that infant and that mother, it was, you know, it was a game. It had a structure. It had different roles that could be played. It obviously wasn't really violating an expectation because, you know, if you sort of understand what's going to happen, you know that they're going to pull it back. I mean, the mother wasn't reaching for it really fast to try to get it. You know, she was playing along. But, you know, within each of those offer and withdrawals, it has this structure of a very basic joke, right? I mean, it has this setup, the offer, and then this, you know, punchline, if you will, this violation, which is the withdrawal. And, um, and, you know, once I started to think about it as kind of a, you know, very simple joke,

• 57:14Speaker 03

  it made me want to, to look to see where else apes might have, you know, might sort of create these moments of expectation violation for each other. It seemed to be something that they both were enjoying doing. They were both doing voluntarily. And, um, you know, and it seemed likely that this was a behavior that you might see more broadly, if only you sort of knew what to look for.

• 57:42Sean Carroll?

  It reminds me of a recent podcast I did with Rebecca Neuburger-Goldstein. I don't know if you know her, but she's a philosopher and novelist, and she has a book out on mattering, what it means to matter and why we care about mattering so much. And she defines it, what it means to, to matter is not to just want attention, but to feel that you are deserving of attention. And certainly it seems to me, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but some of these games, some of these proto jokes are about asking for attention and being rewarded by like, oh, yes, I am worthy of it. I mean, maybe there's a benefit to being teased as well as to being the teaser.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the kind of, you know, the function of these teasing behaviors because, you know, I think it's interesting just to document them, of course, and say, do apes do these? And, you know, what do they look like? And when do they occur? And who's doing them? But ultimately, we want to know, why are they doing them? Is this something that, you know, that has a benefit to, you know, developing a place in a social world? Is it something that helps you understand others' minds more? Is it something that helps you develop social relationships? And so one of the things that we've been thinking about is that they might, in fact, be serving these

• 59:02Speaker 03

  kind of playful teasing, sort of proto-jokes, if you will, you know, might be serving both to build relationships, but also to test those relationships, you know, because I think they have this, this element of how far can I push you? Or how far am I willing to be pushed? And those are things that are not transferable across individuals, right? I, you know, I can call, like, a good friend of mine a bitch, but I can't call my... Can I say that on the podcast, hopefully?

• 59:34Sean Carroll?

  You can say it. People have said far worse things.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Okay. Right. But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say that to my boss. And, and so I think that, that those are things that, you know, can, can serve to strengthen a relationship. You think about, sort of, you know, early dating, right? A lot of flirtation is teasing. A lot of it is how, you know, oh, I like have a little sort of nudge, a little poke, a little like, see how you take it, testing the waters, do you laugh it off? You know, is this like, do we have that kind of relationship? And if we do, then you can go a little bit farther, right? And...

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  And I think that's true of friendships, it's true of romantic relationships, it's true of family relationships. And those kinds of, you know, I think the way that teasing can serve as, you know, a sort of test of relationship strength is seeing how much the other individual sort of values the relationship over their momentary annoyance. Right? It's like, ugh, fine, but I love you, so I'm not gonna be annoyed. And, you know, especially when you look at like, parents and infants, or parents and young children, you know, they put up with all kinds of things that they wouldn't from, say, you know, just

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  look at like, anyone in a grocery line. If a young child is doing something to a parent, the parent is going to put up with a lot more than they would if like, the unrelated stranger adult behind them did the same thing. Right? Because it's, because it's a, I think, an honest signal of how much they value that relationship.

• 1:01:16Sean Carroll?

  And one of the things that, you know, young children do, and also animals do, is sort of scope out, I talked to Judea Pearl on the podcast once, make a causal map of the physical world. Like, if I poke this, what happens? And I guess what you're suggesting is teasing and play play an analogous role in the social world. You're sort of seeing where you are, what the relationships are, how you can interact with different members of the social group in different contexts.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And I think that one thing that is interesting about this sort of social hypothesis testing is that it isn't static. It's not that, you know, once you learn the sort of the rules, you now know them, right? So, I mean, I think there's a certain extent to which, like, once you learn the physical properties of, you know, an object, you know them, you don't have to keep testing them. I don't think the same is true of social relationships, because those change in a way that physical properties don't. You know, your relationship with your friend, or your sibling...

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  You know, today might be quite different than it was yesterday. It might be different because they're in a different mood. It might be different because you pushed them too far yesterday. It might be different because, you know, something changed about their environment. And so, learning how to predict their responses to your actions is very critical in, you know, in anticipating the sort of, in anticipating, in accurately anticipating and evaluating the relationship that you have with them. You know, I remember, you know, anytime, sort of like being a graduate student, right?

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  And, you know, there would be days when you would go into your advisor and, and, you know, they'd be in a great mood and they were like, "Yeah, this is a great idea. Let's go with it." And other days where they were like, "This is a horrible idea." Like, back to the drawing board. And, you know, you would rely on the graduate students who had meetings before you to tell you whether this was like a day, a good day to pitch a new idea or not a good day. So I, you know, I do think that, that, that the social relationships matter, but that they, this is a landscape that continues to change over time. And so, you want to not just learn about, you know, the sort of baseline state, but you want to improve your ability to predict.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  And I think that's one of the things that teasing is doing, is it's giving a sort of low stakes, you know, environment for practicing the attribution of others', others' reactions to you.

• 1:04:06Sean Carroll?

  So I guess there's teasing and joking and so forth, but i- is it accurate to put game playing at a slightly higher level of abstraction? I mean, we have, you know, we human beings have games with very complicated rules and roles and things like that. Anything analogous to that in different parts of the animal kingdom?

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't think there's anything, say analogous to chess. But I certainly think there are things analogous to tag and to hide and seek and to sort of, you know, some children's games. There, I think there's an appreciation for, you know, for turn-taking that can occur with, you know, things like chase, you know, I mean, dogs all the time, one, you know, I chase you. Now it's your turn to chase me. And it isn't, you know, it isn't just that I turn around and it isn't just that like one dog chases, you know, A chases B and then at some point A gets tired, turns around and runs the other direction. A will turn around, run a little ways, look back at B.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  And if B doesn't follow them, A will go forward, you know, will play bow, will bark, will nudge them. And it's sort of a like reminder, hey, you're supposed to be doing something.

• 1:05:19Sean Carroll?

  We're playing a game here.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Right. And so I do think that there are these, you know, simple role reversals in social games that animals have. You know, I, I think it's also possible that there can be non-social games. And that's one thing that, you know, trying to look at a little bit, we started a new project, so I'm launching a canine cognition lab at IU. And our first study is we're doing a, a project looking at dogs collecting behavior. So we're interested, it's a collaboration with a developmental psychologist, Martin Zetterstein, who has looked at this in children and like sort of looking at children's collections of objects and, you know, how those differ around the world and change over time and things like that.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  And, you know, he's found that, that children basically everywhere, uh, collect at least one thing. And I'm really interested in, um, in whether any dogs exhibit similar behavior. And so one of the things we're asking in that is, you know, uh, do dogs who are interested in a particular type of object, do they manipulate them or say order them or store them in any way that has like internal structure to it? So do they? Put them all in one place. Do they rearrange them? Do they, you know, put all the purple ones together? And so I, I do think that it might be possible that there are a lot of things that we could consider games if we looked at them.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  You know, that could consider essentially private games, you know, things that are about setting arbitrary goals and, uh, you know, trying to achieve them. I, the, the one example I have, um, you know, that's sort of a self-driven game, uh, from my dog Bonnie. So she has this little stone turtle that she is obsessed with. She actually has 11 stone turtles, but there's one in particular. She, uh, they came from a garden store. We used to have them in our garden and she just like loved to find them and dig them up and bury them. And so there's one, um,

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  sorry, uh, there's one whose name is Darius, by the way, um, because every time we find him, I go, Darius. So there we go. I know. It's really, it's really cheesy, but she likes it. Um, so, uh, in this game, I will like roll the turtle up in towels and she has to like dig through and find him, right? And she loves this and she will play it for hours and just like go completely, it will bring her out of like any bad mood or if she's stressed out about having gone to the vet or whatever. But what I think is really, really interesting, and one of the things that, that leads me to think that animals, at least some animals, again, might sort of play games by themselves is that she will bury it for herself.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  So if I have kind of like, if I've gotten tired or I'm on a Zoom call or, you know, whatever, she'll take it and she'll put it, you know, on a towel and she'll put another towel on top of it and she'll like smoosh it all up and then she'll kind of sit there for a minute and then she'll try to find it again. And, you know, I really think that she is doing, you know, something very similar to what, you know, young children are doing when they're playing. You know, I think as much as you can call a game, something like, I'm going to see how long I can stand on one leg or how many times I can spin around before I fall down. Right? We call these things game-like play in children. It's not, they don't have, you know, structured documented rules, but it's about setting.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  Goals for yourself that don't have any survive, you know, they don't have any immediate benefit other than it feels good to achieve them.

• 1:08:55Sean Carroll?

  It feels good to achieve them. Yeah, like I guess that's where I was interested in going next. What is the, I don't want to use the word motivation because maybe that's already being too anthropocentric. Is it simply that they they do it for the joy of it? Is it an instinct that is kicking in? Is there some tangible benefit?

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  To teasing or to any kind of game?

• 1:09:20Sean Carroll?

  Teasing, to playing, yeah. You give me the answer that is most interesting.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  So I do think that, I mean, I think it feels good. You know, one of the, so one of the things that that we're trying to do actually in a different project that kind of ties in together is I'm working with a philosopher, Colin Allen, and a number of other animal experimentalists and ethologists at different, different institutions around the world to look at joy in animals. And we're actually trying to figure out, we're looking across three different, very, very distinct species, distantly related species. We're looking at Kia, parrots, looking at dolphins, and we're looking at great apes.

• 1:10:05Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  And in this study, what we're trying to do is to develop better biometric measures of positive emotion, to try to look at when animals experience positive emotion, do they communicate it to other individuals? And how does perceiving those communications impact things like memory, attention, and prosociality? And so with apes, we've been looking at laughter. So apes, you know, so first of all, humans are also great apes. So I've been saying apes just to mean non-human apes.

• 1:10:43Sean Carroll?

  We get it. Yep.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, just making sure everyone gets, but so apes laugh, just like humans do. Their laughter sounds a little bit different. And at sort of the risk of making a fool out of myself, I will Try to demonstrate. So, so where I think human laughter, you know, is quite musical. Chimpanzees and bonobo laughter is a little less musical, so it still has this, this rhythmic panting element, but it has less, sort of less melodic qualities. So it's a little more like.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  I recognize that, yeah. Yeah. And it happens a lot during tickling. So infant, it happens a lot with infants, it happens during play. Adults will tickle infants, infants will laugh. And bonobo, I'm sorry, and gorillas and orangutans will also laugh, but their laughter again is like even less musical and more breathy. But all of the species laugh, they laugh in very similar environments. And so what we've been doing is trying to use laughter and using it as a, an auditory stimulus for a whole set of experiments to say,

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  how does hearing another's laughter impact the way you, you know, think about the future, the way you interact with others, the way you remember things, the way you perceive facial expressions, you know, things like that. And, and generally what we found in this line of experiments is that, you know, it seems to improve, it seems to impact them both physiologically and cognitively. Okay. We've done some things with thermal imaging where we're looking to see, which, you know, basically is a, an external measure where you can use a thermal camera to look at changes in blood flow by measuring the skin temperature.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  And so what we're looking for in gray apes is that we're looking for a, a dip in nasal temperature. So we look for the nose to get cold as an indication of emotional arousal. So are you getting more excited? And when you're excited, the blood gets drawn into your core. So your things in your periphery get colder. It's sort of a fight or flight reflex. And that can happen when you're feeling excited and happy. It can also happen when you're feeling excited and angry. So we want to pair that with other behavioral measures to say, well, how do we know the animal isn't just scared? Or, you know, isn't pissed off? They don't hear this laughter and they're like, well, that sucks. Like, I hate that guy.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  And so, you know, so we're pairing it with things like we, we did what's called a cognitive bias test, which was developed originally for use in animal welfare as a way of trying to say, do animals become more optimistic or more pessimistic following changes into their enclosure? And so we applied this to great apes. And so in this test, what you do is you first train them on to, we call them anchor stimuli. So in this case, it was actually a black box and a white box. And the black box was always rewarded and the white box was never rewarded. And so what they did in the study was they pressed a button and then we showed them at the other side of their enclosure, a box.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  So they press a button and then another person holds up a box. And then the ape has to decide, do I want to get up, expend energy to walk over and see if there's food in the box? And so they learn, you know, it took some time, but they learn that they should always go for the black boxes and never go for the white boxes. And then after, once they get that down and they're, you know, demonstrating, you know, with very high precision, go for the black, skip the white. Because they can, they can just press the button and get a new box to skip, right? And so they're like, skip, skip, skip, oh, this one, skip, skip, skip, ah, that one. And so in the actual test, what we do is we throw in a few gray boxes.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  They've never seen them before and they're somewhere in between the black and the white. And what we're interested in is using that as a measure of optimism. Okay. So do they treat those intermediate boxes more like the positive one or more like the neutral one or the negative one? And what we found is that great apes, well specifically bonobos,

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  when they hear, when they've listened to laughter, they're more likely to approach the gray boxes than than when they've listened to a control sound. So I think that's, you know, one behavioral piece of evidence that I think suggests that listening to laughter leads to them expecting more positive things.

• 1:15:38Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, and there's no actual

• 1:15:43Sean Carroll?

  connection, right, between the laughter and whether or not there is something good in the gray box or not.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right. So it's simply, it's kind of, you know, a laugh track. They listen to it for a while. Right. It's not providing any useful information. We're interested in whether it's essentially inducing them, like putting them into a better mood. And if they're, you know, in a better mood, we think that they should expect more positive things than if they're in a, you know, not, I don't want to say negative mood because we're not, we're not trying to put them in a bad mood. We're just not, we're, you know, playing a very neutral kind of environmental water sound.

• 1:16:23Sean Carroll?

  In humans, playing and humor are very closely associated with imagination and pretending. That sounds like something that would be hard to study in great apes, but is there anything that we can say about how, how much the quality of imagination is present when they're doing these things?

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. So one of the things that I think people have been very interested in for a long time is play signaling. That, you know, communicative signals that, that different species use to say, hey, now I'm playing. This is something that's been looked at a lot in dogs and in wolves. You know, the play bow in dogs is the sort of classical play signal. And what's really interesting about that is it, um, you know, it seems to be something that's, you know, very species typical. It's not learned. It's something that, you know, even young puppies will do. But it's, it's not so much the production of it, it's the interpretation.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  So when a dog sees another dog play bow, they're, you know, they are less likely to respond to that other dog's, um, you know, pouncing and biting things in an aggressive manner.

• 1:17:41Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  And so, you know, I think that this is, is an example of a kind of, um, behavior that could be creating this frame, right? Where it's saying, hey, the thing that I'm about to do shouldn't be taken seriously. Now, is that pretense? Is that imagination? I mean, not to the extent of, you know, a four-year-old saying, you know, this spoon is a scepter and I'm a princess. But it is still marking something as different from the, the quotidian, right? Different from the, the way this behavior would normally be interpreted.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  And I think that that's also happening in teasing, you know, and that a lot of teasing is I'm, I'm doing something, but, you know, I'm, it shouldn't be sort of blown out of proportion, right? It shouldn't be, uh, like if I steal something from you and I'm teasing, it shouldn't be taken as seriously as if I steal something from you outside of a teasing interaction.

• 1:18:51Sean Carroll?

  Right. And yeah, it's useful social knowledge for everyone to agree on that, on that protocol. Right?

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so, you know, I- It's diff- I mean, I think it's really difficult. I mean, a fascinating area, and I love, you know, thinking about these things. And, you know, from a theoretical standpoint, I mean, I think that's where, really where philosophy can, can play a big role is in saying, well, what, you know, what would be the burden of proof, right? What would, how could, you know, in a non-verbal way, how can we differentiate these things? Because that's the difficulty in looking at non-human animals is that, you know, you can't ask them, well, you know, what did Fred mean when, you know, when he did this behavior? Or why did you respond differently to Fred than you did to Larry when they came over and tried to bite you? And, you know, in humans, even young children, you can say, oh, well, I

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  know Fred was just playing. You can't do that in animals. And so we need to come up with creative ways of looking either at their spontaneous behaviors to see, well, how does this, the social situation, the social dynamics and the, the actions in the interaction differ, as well as developing, you know, biometric markers of emotion, where we're looking at things, ideally, you know, things that you can measure externally in free-ranging animals who, you know, are naturally interacting. So things like, like looking at, at skin temperature, or looking at, you know, piloerection, like the hair

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  standing on end and things like that. So you can, you know, there are some things where you can see behaviorally and externally that are, you know, direct responses to internal physiological processes. And I don't think there's going to be a single answer. I mean, I, I do think that these are complicated questions that really rely on bringing, sort of a multi-method approach, bringing together, you know, experiments where we're asking questions about, you know, what happens when you're presented with this kind of stimulus, together with observations of natural behavior, together with, you know, studies of social

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  preference. You know, do you prefer to interact with an individual who you've seen teasing someone else or not? Uh, one of the things that I think, you know, we haven't looked at yet, but I, you know, just thinking of kind of commonalities in, in humor and sort of the, you know, origins of human humor, one of the things that should be more funny is bringing down those in power, right? It's punching off the hierarchy. Um, and I, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that same thing in apes. You know, if you saw, like, if you say, watched a video where, you know, a dominant male,

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  uh, you know, like slipped and fell in the mud versus, or fell off a branch or something as opposed to, uh, subordinate, um, you know, or juvenile. Um, and I think, you know, could, or you watch, you know, a, a juvenile teasing an adult male versus adult male teasing a juvenile. And I think, I think that it should be more interesting, um, and potentially funnier, uh, to, to see, you know, the mighty brat low.

• 1:22:22Sean Carroll?

  I, I, I like that as, uh, an aspiration. I'm not sure empirically whether or not human beings, we even pass that test. We, we often kind of like to punch down sometimes.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's one of the things where we would, you know, we, in thinking about the comparative approach, I mean, the intuitions that, you know, we have about, oh, here's what humor is like in humans. We obviously have to ask those questions in humans as well, um, to make sure that, you know, we're not simply building on our, um, you know, our assumptions based on our own past experience.

• 1:22:58Sean Carroll?

  So, speaking of the comparative approach, this leads us to sort of the last thing I wanted to ask, uh, and it's the thing I often ask last these days in the podcast, which is something to do with AI. Um, I mean, you're studying, uh, comparatively, humans and other kinds of animals. So those are the data points we possibly have about natural intelligence here on Earth. And now we're faced with the prospect of a different kind of intelligence that we make artificially. Uh, maybe it's not there yet in terms of, um, self-awareness or whatever, but is there anything that we're learning or suggesting or, or big questions we need to start asking that relate, uh, artificial intelligence to these natural ones that you're studying?

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is the, you know, potentially to date myself, the $64,000 question. I was like, I really feel like this should be, I should raise that now. So as someone who, who, you know, has built a career out of studying communication and comparative cognition, the AI question is a fascinating but also irritating one. Yeah. And I say irritating, you know, sort of tongue in cheek, but I think it's because, you know, especially LLMs.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  So, I mean, AI obviously can mean many, many different things. But for a lot of people, when it comes to, you know, asking questions about, you know, what does AI understand, what can it do, can it pass X or Y psychological test, we're really talking about LLMs, you know, things like At the moment, right. Right, at the moment. And what is very, I think that we are really in a critical moment where it could go one of two ways. For a long time, language was seen as this, you know, defining line between humans and other animals.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  And even, you know, even today, I think there are some kinds of questions that some scientists are, you know, not happy with people asking in a nonverbal way. So there's still debate about whether animals have things like episodic memory. Can they remember themselves in the past, sort of from a first person or a first animal perspective? And the way you ask questions about that in humans is through self-report. And there are, you know, behavioral tasks where you can ask whether animals can use, you know, their memory of something in the past to plan for the future. Some people argue that demonstrates episodic memory, other people argue it doesn't.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  And so, you know, these arguments I think are important ones, but, you know, are really difficult to resolve, given that you can't ask most animals verbally.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  You can ask an LLM and they will give you a response. An answer. Yeah, they will give you an answer and it will often be the same answer that a human would give you. But they also have access to all, essentially all of human language, you know, all of the sort of documented data points and responses and, you know, next turns, next word predictions of of human history, you know, the the current internet. And I think the big question is, does an LLM understand anything?

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  And this is actually something that that we've done some work on, where, you know, we're we're advocating for applying more sort of guidelines and methods from animal communication or animal cognition to the study of AI and LLM specifically. Because I think a lot of times, because of the methods that we use to study cognition and intelligence in humans, when we can ask you, you know, when we get verbal report from humans, we assume that that tells us something about what's going on inside. Right.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  I don't think the same should be true for an LLM. So we can't just, you know, take them at their word. And what we need to do is to develop, you know, much more sort of thoughtful, systematic ways of of probing their levels of understanding by, you know, manipulating the way you ask questions, by changing the modality or the the situation that you're posing to them. And I and I think that this is an area where comparative cognition researchers, people working in animal behavior and animal cognition.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  And also developmental psychologists have a lot of experience. You know, this is because you can't just ask, you know, a one year old or a two year old. Hey, why did you think this, right? Or why did you do this? You can't ask, you know, a magpie or a chimpanzee, why did you do this? You can ask an L L M and it will give you an answer. But the question is, does that answer actually map on to why they did that? And, you know, coming back around to trusting language. You know, this is is a question even with human adults. The way that, you know, if you ask someone, hey, why did you give that answer? What the reason we think we did something might not actually be the reason we did it. And so even with human adults, you have to be.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  You know, some, I don't want to say skeptical, but you have to be somewhat careful in, you know, just taking verbal self report as as the final word on the matter. So you, I think with many of these of these things where we're trying to understand what's going on under the hood, so to speak. We really need to bring together, we really need to bring a multitude of approaches to bear on these questions.

• 1:29:16Sean Carroll?

  Do you think that they're doing that? Do you think that the L L M people are reaching out to psychologists and anthropologists and philosophers to get more insight on these things as much as they should?

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  I think some of them are. I don't think any of them are as much as they should. You know, I think this is really an area where

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  I think we will see more collaboration and more development in the years to come. When, you know, I think when people really, you know, sort of hit walls and want to understand, hey, what's, you know, why, why are we getting this error? Why are they not doing the thing that we expected they would do? Because we thought they were doing the first thing, the way humans do it. And so, you know, I think it's going to take kind of.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  I don't think these are going to be problems that you can engineer your way out of just in terms of improving the algorithm. I think there are things that where you really have to try to find ways of assessing.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  What the, you know, what the LLM is, is telling you about how it's doing the thing.

• 1:30:31Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, questions that we cannot engineer our way out of. Those are some of my favorite things. So I want to thank you for being on the podcast, but also like you, you're the kind of scientist who has websites and resources and things that listeners can go poke at. So what should our listeners know that would be fun for them?

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for asking, Sean. So one of the things that, you know, I would love, I'd love to get people to check out is that we're actually asking people to give us their own, to share their own experiences with animals teasing. And so this could be, you know, your dog or your cat. It could be, you know, you watch two crows over a field. It could be something you saw at the zoo. It doesn't have to be, you know, we're collecting any kind of animal experiences of teasing that you might have experienced. And so the website there is observinganimals.org. And we'll have, we actually have several different sort of public science studies up there, but there's one on teasing. And

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  so if anyone, you know, listens to this and has reflections about animals that they've seen teasing, we would love to hear, to hear about them. And then, you know, more broadly, if people are interested in the work, you know, that, that we're doing at IU or, you know, that my lab is doing, we're starting a, a new center at, new research center at IU, which is called the Center for Possible Minds. So that's possibleminds.org. You can just check out the Center for Possible Minds. And yeah, we'd love to have folks reach out if they're interested in getting involved with any of the things that we're doing there. This is a new initiative launched by myself and Jacob Foster. And we also run the Diverse Intelligence's Summer Institute, which again, you can find out more information

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  through our center website. So yeah, thanks so much for, for asking and for having me on. It's been a real delight having a chance to talk to you about, about some of this work and, and to think about it together.

• 1:32:32Sean Carroll?

  You're going to be inundated with so many stories of people thinking their pets have done cute things. That's, that's an endless supply of those. So Erica Cartmill, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  Thanks again, Sean.

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