Learning process by goldfish and its use of a local site as a map

Are fish the victims of 'speciesism'? A discussion about fear, pain and animal consciousness

Fish welfare is currently a hotly debated topic; this is mainly due to the issue of whether or not fish have the capacity for conscious awareness, or subjective states. Because of the contentious nature of animal consciousness, the subject is often avoided in many welfare arguments, but it is argued that since welfare should be about how animals feel, this issue is unavoidable. There is also good reason to believe that the issue of assessing subjective states is not as insurmountable as some believe.

Event detection by forward- and backward-prediction, illustrating the analysis for behaviors of black larder beetle Dermestes haemorrhoidalis Küster

There are several studies that estimate the emergent event from the time series of behavior in some organisms. However, they do not focus on the emergent event itself. Our aim is to detect the emergent event from the time series of individual's behavior, focusing on the transition from predictable machinery behavior to purpose-oriented behavior and vice versa. We recorded the behavior of larvae and adults of black larder beetle. To detect the emergent event of the beetle, we defined a forward- and backward-prediction model. In the forward-prediction, the next state in the time series of behavior was interpreted by precedent behavior. In the backward-prediction, the previous state in the time series of behavior was interpreted by subsequent behavior. The time step with conspicuous peak of the co-intensity of errors in the forward- and backward-prediction was regarded as the timing at which the emergent event occurs. At the same time, the time series of states was estimated to determine whether noise was stationary or non-stationary. The attribute of noise was estimated using the Allan variance. The time series of the larvae's velocity of walking showed stationary noise. But in the case of the adults, whole time series contained 1/f noise. And, when time series was divided before and after the detected event, the noise changed from stationary to non-stationary and vice versa. These results suggest that development enables an individual to change the internal mechanism of walk considering the slight change of environment.

Zipf's law in phonograms and Weibull distribution in ideograms: comparison of English with Japanese

Frequency distribution of word usage in a word sequence generated by capping is estimated in terms of the number of "hits" in retrieval of web-pages, to evaluate structure of semantics proper not to a particular text but to a language. Especially we compare distribution of English sequences with Japanese ones and obtain that, for English and Japanese phonogram, frequency of word usage against rank follows power-law function with exponent 1 and, for Japanese ideogram, it follows stretched exponential (Weibull distribution) function. We also discuss that such a difference can result from difference of phonogram based- (English) and ideogram-based language (Japanese).

Autonomous choice in the learning process of a turtle Chinemys reevesii

We studied animal's learning of spatial discrimination in an experimental environment. Turtles, Chinemys reevesii, were employed for the study. We focused on two independent aspects: (1) turtle's success rate in the task, which is the most common criterion to estimate the ability of the animals, and (2) the statistical properties of the time interval of the task, which is independent on the spatial criterion. For a statistical analysis, we employed the scheme of power law distributions which was recently used to estimate animal behaviors in relation to the idea of the fractal. We addressed the basic problem of whether these two criteria, or any other criteria for this matter, could or could not exclude an observer who studies the animal behavior. To demonstrate inseparability of an observer and the object, we conducted three different learning experiments: (1) complete spatial discrimination, (2) incomplete spatial discrimination, (3) another, different, complete discrimination, in this order. The incomplete one was taken to mean incomplete only for an observer. Our experiments reveal that the same result (success rate) was perceived differently by the animal if the attitude of the observer to the experiments differed. This observation comes to suggest that the notion of autonomous choice on the part of an animal is contingent upon the inseparability between an observer and the object.

Learning process by goldfish and its use of a local site as a map

The issue we address is whether an animal knows or understands the significance of learning. We constructed an animal's own conceptualization via resolving a paradox underlying the process of learning. We found a kind of self-similar pattern in the behavior of goldfish resolving a paradoxical experimental problem. The pattern can be considered as a solution to the paradox in the experiment. An animal's own learning should be revised through solving paradoxes. The dualism of mechanistic thinking and vitalism can thus be avoided.