Funding my research on horse and critter cognition

Our research concept is this: Instinct is a body of expert knowledge or belief. The research question is how can we discover and represent it? After all, knowledge representation in humans is a well developed field.

So we have begun to explore the ways that this research might be funded. There are a variety of possible funding sources, because animal behavior is also a well developed field. We have done both federally funded and privately funded research in the past and both of these sources are available for animal behavior.

On the US federal side both NIH and NSF have programs related to animal behavior. The focus at NIH is veterinary, which includes instinct  driven behavior that is harmful to the animal. At NSF the topic is part of the Biological Integration program. The USDA may do some work in this area as well, but it seems to be confined to agricultural animals.

Private sector research funding comes from a variety of sources. There are foundations that fund animal research, including several for horses. There are also various membership clubs and associations, especially for domestic and sporting animals, including horses.

There are also a number of associations that focus on wildlife and conservation, both of which involve behavior. This sort of research is also done by parks, zoos, conservation preserves, etc. There may be a U.S. Federal research role here as well, because there are a number of conservation and land management agencies.

Another interesting possibility is the emerging practice of "crowdsourcing" or "crowdfunding" where large numbers of people each contribute a small amount to a project. In particular there are a lot of horse owners who are interested in understanding their critters.

Animals lead full lives that we do not understand

Lately we have been watching a pair of Carolina wrens feeding their nestlings. There is nothing unusual in their behavior, with one exception. This is that they spend a lot of time "singing" or as I prefer to call it, in calling.

Neither term seems correct because each suggests aspects which may not be true, because humans sing and call for specific reasons. Perhaps vocalizing is the best term for it.

In any case this behavior seems odd. Feeding young is a time consuming and strenuous activity. Why do the birds also spend a lot of time vocalizing, which is also time consuming and strenuous? Why not just feed the young, then eat and rest?

The point is that feeding young has a clear purpose, while vocalizing during feeding does not. Understanding the purpose of behavior is central to understanding that behavior and this is the grand challenge when it comes to understanding animal behavior. Recording the behavior is not enough, although it may help reveal the underlying purpose.

Note that explanations of human behavior are typically in terms of purpose, not action. "Going to work" is a better explanation than "driving a car" when someone asks what you are doing. The why of behavior is often more important than the what of it.

Every day I see behavior in animals that I do not understand because I do not know its purpose. It is important to learn to see things this way, to recognize how little we understand and to figure out how we can come to understand it. Moreover, simply saying that the behavior is instinctive is not an explanation at all.

Instinct does not control behavior

Saying that an animal's behavior is instinctive is deeply ambiguous. It incorrectly suggests that the instinct is in control, but while knowledge often guides or assists behavior it does not control it.

Instinct is a form of knowledge (or belief) and of course what we know or believe has a lot to do with what we do in a given situation. But this does not mean that we do not think or make decisions. Yet the concept of instinct is often used to imply that the critter does not think. This is a deep conceptual confusion.

In fact instinct allows the animal to think more deeply that it otherwise could, because that is how knowledge helps us. Here is a simple example. I have been treating a horse for a nasty wound, following the vet's instructions and working on the wound twice a day.  Recently there was a new swelling, which concerned me, so I called the vet to come take a look. He looked at the wound and quickly saw what I could not see, which is that it was healing nicely. The swelling was good, not bad, a normal part of the progression.

Because of his knowledge the vet literally saw what I could not see. This is how knowledge works, and how instinct works as well. Knowledge lets us see (or smell, feel, etc.) the world in ways that those who lack the knowledge cannot.

So, for example, a bird can see a good nesting site, or some good nest building material. A horse can see a good thing to eat or a good place to scratch its back. A beaver can see that it now needs some mud. In no case does this mean that the animal is not thinking, quite the contrary. It is actually able to think in ways that we cannot, because it has knowledge that we lack.

Of course the animal can also be wrong, just as humans often are. This is why I sometimes mention belief along with knowledge, because the animal may be working on a false belief. For example, horses are wary animals by instinct and they may shy because they see what they mistakenly think is a threat, such as a stump. Even experts make mistakes.

In horses the idea of misunderstanding or false beliefs on the horse's part may be important when it comes to training and managements problems. But first we have to understand the underlying instinct.

Modeling Instinct Using Expert Systems

Given that instincts are bodies of expert knowledge then the methods of expert system building should be useful in modeling them. In fact trying to build an expert system model of an instinct might be the ideal way to come to grips with the deep research problem of how instincts work. Modeling instincts is a research program.

A bird building a nest or a beaver building a dam are clearly cases of the application of expert knowledge. If anyone doubts this they should try building a bird nest. So are a horse grazing in motion, a crow cawing, a herbivore selecting plants to eat, or a woodpecker picking a drum tree, as I see it. Each of these cases is discussed in prior articles here. There are many other cases that could be mentioned. In fact defining the specific areas of instinctive expertise in each kind of critter is a research program all on its own.

Building an expert system primarily means specifying a set of rules that embody a specific body of expert knowledge. That this can be done, that such expert rules exist, is itself a great discovery. Often the individual rules are relatively simple. It is the combining of these simple rules that yields the complex behavior of expertise.

Normally the expert rules are found using a process called knowledge engineering. It involves a combination of interviewing experts and reading technical documents, such as manuals, handbooks and textbooks.

When it comes to horses or critters in general, this method of knowledge engineering is not available. Rather the approach has to be to ask what expert rules explain the observed behavior. This is likely to be significantly more difficult than simply interviewing an expert, but there is no reason it cannot work. Even asking the question is useful because it creates a systematic approach to understanding an instinct. It breaks the problem down into one of finding a set of simple rules.

For example, here are two simple rules that might help explain how herbivores decide which plants to eat:

Rule 1: If it tastes good it is probably okay to eat it.

Rule 2: If it tastes bad it is probably not okay to eat it.

Note that the use of "it" here will require being able to tell one kind of plant from another. This will require a set of rules of its own. The use of "probably" means that other rules might modify these rules, such that good tasting plants are not eaten and bad tasting plants are eaten.

The point is that instinct is often an innate form of expertise. Trying to find the simple expert rules underlying important instincts is a feasible research program. This will greatly increase our understanding of animal behavior. In the case of horses this understanding will facilitate the training and management of the critters.

What plant eaters eat and how to think about it

We recently observed some profoundly interesting eating behavior in groundhogs. A juvenile groundhog and its mother were grazing together. The mother started eating a plant and the juvenile came over and ate some of it out of her mouth. It then went and ate a great deal of the same plant, which we had not seen it do before.

It is possible that this was all a coincidence, but it looks like the juvenile learned that this kind of plant was edible from its mother. This raises the issue of how herbivores, including horses, know what to eat? It also raises the issue of how animals know how to learn?

The eating issue is interesting because the number of different species of plants is enormous, so instinct alone cannot say which are edible and which are not. Instinct can provide general guidance, beyond which there must be some some sort of learning process. but the learning process itself must be at least partially instinctive.

Here I am reminded of Chomsky's theory of language learning in humans. He argues that infant humans learn language far to quickly for the process to be one of inductive inference, that is by generalizing broad rules from narrow instances. There are too many different possible languages that fit the infant's limited experiences.

This also rules out trial and error learning, which we do not observe. Trial and error may occur for specific words, but not for learning the language as a whole.

Chomsky therefore concludes that all human language has an underlying structure that is known instinctively. If so then the vast array of different human languages are merely local variants on this universal underlying structure. Thus the child is not learning language per se, rather just the local variant.

The same may also be true when horses, groundhogs and rabbits learn what to eat. The basic framework knowledge must be instinctive, supplemented by a learning process that is also grounded in instinct. This is just two examples of an instinct being a body of basic knowledge. The challenges are (1) how to figure out what that knowledge is and (2) how to express it using human concepts and language, which may be very different from the critter's concepts.

Selecting a drum tree

I have long been fascinated by woodpeckers drumming on trees because the tree is basically an instrument. This is a good case of (1) an animal implementing an instinct and (2) the thinking required on the animal's part.

The big thing is selecting the tree. Drumming is generally considered to be the equivalent of bird song, so it proclaims a territory. So the first thing the woodpecker has to do is to pick a territory. My guess is that this is based on picking a nesting site. Given the nest site the choice of a drum tree is constrained by distance. The woodpecker cannot just go off and find a good drum tree somewhere.

A good drum tree is probably relatively rare. It is typically a standing, but still hard, dead tree with no top and little or no bark. Having rotten wood or a top or bark would all dampen the sound of the drumming. I doubt that the woodpecker tries every tree so they probably know what they are looking for by instinct, but picking the right tree is a local decision.

Thus the woodpecker is solving a two variable local optimization problem, which is not simple. That is, it has to find a good drum tree that is close enough to the nest site to do the job of territorial announcement. I imagine this involves a lot of looking and testing.

If the bird uses more than one drum tree then there is also the issue of deciding which one to use at any given time. This is a separate local decision process.

It is also interesting that woodpeckers sometimes use buildings for drumming. This means that the instinct is not confined to looking for a tree. They are looking for a way to make a certain sound, which is a relatively abstract desire.

The point is that, just as with our other cases, instinct may give the woodpecker knowledge and a desire to act but local decisions are still required. Making these decisions requires thought, as well as the use of concepts.

Instinct is flexible so its execution requires thought

One of the basic points I am trying to get across is that the exercise of an instinct requires a great deal of thinking on the animal's part. Instinct is basically an alternative to learning, which means the critter knows something, or how to do something, without first learning it. The animal is born an expert, as it were.

But actually implementing that knowledge in a specific situation requires a lot of thought, just as it does with learned expertise in humans. So simply saying that an animal does what it does by instinct is missing an important question, namely what is the animal thinking? Interestingly there is a lot of research on how humans apply expertise, which may be useful in understanding how animals apply instincts.

Nor is understanding a specific instinct easy. Here the key question is what does the animal have to know (or believe) in order to do what it does? Merely saying it is instinctive is not helpful.