Research Bites Podcast

#26: Dr. Daniel Mills on understanding animal emotions and behavior

• Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB

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In this episode of the Research Bites podcast, host Dr. Kristina Spaulding interviews Professor Daniel Mills, a renowned expert in veterinary behavioral medicine from the University of Lincoln. They explore the complexities of animal behavior, the evolution of different behavioral models, and the role of emotions in influencing behavior. Professor Mills shares insights from his extensive research, including the development of the psychobiological model for assessing animal behavior and his work on using AI to detect emotions and pain in animals.

Key Topics Covered:

  • Behavioral Models Explained: Differences between the medical, behavioral, and psychobiological approaches to animal behavior.
  • The Role of Emotion in Behavior: Considering internal states is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of animal behavior.
  • AI and Emotion Detection: How artificial intelligence is being used to recognize emotions and pain in animals, including dogs, cats, and horses.
  • The Impact of Cognitive Load: How factors like discomfort or anxiety can affect an animal's cognitive capacity and behavior.
  • Human-Animal Interactions: How dogs respond to human facial expressions and vocal cues, and the importance of building a positive relationship with pets.
  • Challenges in Scientific Communication: Addressing the uncertainty of science, biases, and the influence of beliefs on interpreting behavior.

Key Quotes:

  •  "Dogs live in an emotional world, often looking to synchronize their emotions with those of their human companions." 
  • "Science is about reducing uncertainty, not finding absolute truths."

Timestamps:

  • [00:05:45] Discussion of different behavioral models
  • [00:18:47] The function and importance of emotions in animals
  • [00:24:03] Using AI for emotion recognition in animals
  • [00:46:47] The effects of cognitive load on behavior
  • [00:48:42] How dogs respond to human emotions and facial expressions
  • [00:59:57] The complexities of scientific communication

Resources Mentioned:

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. Kristina Spaulding, and this is the Research Bites podcast brought to you by Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior. We foster conversations about science and its application to animal training and behavior in an effort to improve well being for animals and the people they live with.

Please enjoy geeking out about the science of behavior.

 If you're enjoying this podcast, you may be interested in joining my membership program called Research Bites. It's the fastest and easiest way to keep up with the dog behavior research because I do the work for you. If you love dogs. Love geeking out about behavior and don't have the time or maybe the inclination to read research articles.

This is a great option. You'll enjoy monthly webinars from yours truly summarizing, analyzing, and discussing recent dog behavior research. In addition, several times a month, members also get together to engage in fascinating and thought provoking discussions about dog behavior and research. If you'd like to learn more, Please visit my website, www.

sciencemattersllc. com, the link is also in the show notes. 

[00:01:27] Guest: On today's episode, I have Professor Mills. He is a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln in the UK. He is a practicing veterinary surgeon and academic who has specialized in the management of problem behavior and the human animal bond for nearly 35 years. In 2004, he was the first individual to be recognized by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

As a specialist in veterinary behavioral medicine, and in 2016 was further recognized by them as the first individual to be granted fellowship status for his contributions to the field. He was also Europe's first professor of his discipline and has pioneered a scientific transformation of our understanding of companion animal problem behavior through the development of a psychobiological approach to clinical animal behavior assessment.

Much of his work is transdisciplinary and he is included in the top half of Stanford University's list of the top 2 percent of scientists in the world and recognized as one of the world's top psychology researchers by research. com. He has published more than 200 full peer reviewed scientific articles and more than 60 books and chapters.

He runs an audio and YouTube podcast series. What makes you click, which features chats with inspirational friends in the field of animal behavior that he has the benefit of getting to know over the course of his career, his contact information will be in the show notes. thank you so much for being here, Danielle.

I'm really looking forward to speaking with you.

[00:03:06] Host: Well, thank you for the opportunity to chat to you. It's always nice to chat to people who are interested in what I have to say.

[00:03:13] Guest: Yes, yes, definitely. Very interested. I start this, the conversation off with this question every time, but with you, I think it's particularly interesting because you really have been a pioneer in this field of veterinary behavior. So what brought you to this subject? Why did you end up pursuing this, especially given that it seems like it wasn't really an established discipline at the time?

[00:03:35] Host: it sort of, as with most things in life, it comes about through luck as much as anything else. I've been interested in looking, watching animals throughout my life. often say I'm the youngest of five children. My two brothers came first, then my two sisters, and then there was me. And I, so I played with the dogs cause my brothers and sisters had each other to play with.

and so it probably started at a very early age and my late mother always used to say I was inseparable from a dog called Amber, who sadly was put to sleep because, um, she bit a lady in a wheelchair. Yeah. So I guess there's a lot of subliminal influence there. I went to vet school. I was interested in animal behavior and welfare.

We were given a lecture on problem behavior, and I just thought this is really good. And, Not that I consciously ever took any advice from my father, but he said, you know, the way to get on in academia is find a field no one knows anything about and you soon become the world's expert. I, but I was in general practice and I was very much enjoying, practice work, but the job just happened to come up for a vet with an interest in behavior in an obscure agricultural college as it was at the time, but it was about to become part of a university.

And that was 30 years ago.

[00:04:46] Guest: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes these things do just sort of happen to fall into our lap, so we're certainly. happy to, that you had that opportunity because now we've had all this information and research, as you know, is really, really important and has been lacking in this field for a very long time.

And so, you talk a lot, you've published a lot of papers. I mean, many people I think know you as a veterinary behaviorist who has written papers about pain. and behavior issues and, that medical side of things, but you actually write about so much more than that. And I want to start with talking about these different models of behavior.

So there's the behavioral model and the medical model. And in the bio, it mentions that you developed the psychobiological model. And can you talk a little bit, about what those different models are and why you think the psycho biological model is the best approach?

[00:05:45] Host: So I think it's worth just, again, just putting this in a historical context. I said, I was very fortunate with some of the people I met actually as a student in the States. they're very eminent professors who were real pioneers in the field. And, you know, they're a different generation and I'm the generation that comes up and there's another generation below me now.

but, you know, they had, All of them sort of had training in PhDs in animal behavior and they started to bring it into the veterinary field. I came in and one of the things that struck me was that we didn't seem to have a very consistent approach. And when I looked at what was going on across sort of disciplines, I basically realized that there were two schools of thought, as I said, the medical versus the behavioral model.

And a lot of people were inconsistently applying those approaches and neither of them quite worked for me. So the medical approach to put it simply is the medicalization of behavior. So it's like being somebody being a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist. And problem behavior is very much framed within the context of disorders.

Now, because the field was sort of relatively new, it was still trying to. So find its various paradigms and there have been some very good people who've advocated that approach borrowing a lot from the human field, but we, I think, increasingly people have got frustrated with psychiatry in the human field because it just doesn't seem to match terribly well with behavioral biology.

It's very reductionist. It focuses on physical entities. So, you know, people sometimes talk about, you know, depression being due to lack of serotonin. Well, actually, when you look at the data. The low levels of serotonin happen after the behavioral changes. So it's not the cause. so there's this focus on, yeah, you know, drugs and biochemistry and genetics in particular with the medical approach and what I saw, and particularly because I moved in, as I said, to an agricultural college where I was surrounded by biologists, They were just sort of, well, that's just doesn't make any sense.

Those sorts of levels of explanation for much of what you see. they're not, it's not that the brain is broken. It's just that the animal, is struggling to cope with the situation that it's been put in. so the other approach, certainly in the UK and I grew up, there was a sort of famous trainer called Barbara Woodhouse, who may well be known to some of you.

And she had a TV show and. She used to tell people and she was all about sort of telling people how to communicate better with their dogs. And, she was fairly brutal. She was quite a TV character. but you know, a lot of the training world falls into that sort of area, which is typified by the American approach of behaviorism, which was instrumental in moving psychology forward.

People like Skinner, you know, had animals in boxes, but the problem there is that it's emphasis just on the stimulus. and the, therefore treatment is seen very much about managing the environment in order to bring about changes in behavior. And again, you know, whilst that is important, that's not the whole story.

as I say, being surrounded by behavioral biologists and animal welfare scientists, it became increasingly apparent, well, this isn't working. And I think. Started to realize that when you looked at sort of people complaining about things like aggression, the labels they use, sometimes they were just contextual.

So they see things, things like he's got food bowl aggression, you know, or sometimes they'd refer to the motivation. They're saying, Oh, he's being, very protective. So the motivation to protect the resources or resource guarding, that'd be focused on motivation. And sometimes people would emphasize the emotion, which was, you know, he was fearful, he was frustrated. It hadn't really been unpicked that we were using these different levels of explanation. It's like the classic story, you know, the three blind men holding onto an elephant, where one's holding the trunk and says it's long and thin. One's holding the ear and says it's thin and floppy. And one's holding the tail and saying it's hairy.

and they've all got part of the story. So started to explore the ideas and all, all psychobiological means is that Unlike behaviorism, I'm willing to infer internal states. Like emotion and motivation. So not just look at the environment and biological means it's got to make sense within the context of evolutionary biology.

So these levels of explanation have to fit and we've developed that approach. It's nothing, well, there is some new stuff in it, but we've taken the best of the medical approach. We've taken the best of the behavioral approach. But put it within a much broader framework. so yes, we do look for markers where we can see that there are markers, but we also recognize that.

Behavior exists on a spectrum, so you're not going to get a unique marker. You know, this is, you know, people have been trying to pursue that with trillions of dollars invested, but we don't have markers of psychiatric states because they're part of biology. There's a continuum. It's not qualitatively different.

You know, at what point you have a clinical depression is a subjective decision. and you know, the approaches of observation that are used in, um, applied behavioral analysis we use as well in order. But we take it a step further rather than just say, these are the environmental contingencies. We say, given those environmental contingencies, what can we say about the motivational state of the animal?

So we do exactly what a behaviorist wouldn't do using their approach. You know, we look at the observations between the animal or the contingencies with its behavior, what happens before, what the consequences are, and then say, right. And it's important, um, to do that because if you aren't, if you make the inference of emotion, you've got a hypothesis that you can test and when it can, we do exactly the same with emotion, but for emotion, whereas for me, the word motivation refers to a specific behavior.

So an animal running away, what is the motivation for it? Whereas emotion refers to a more global state of the brain where it's predisposed. So if an animal is scared, we talk about the fight, flight, and freeze. Each of those, the fight, the flight, and the freeze are specific behaviors with their own motivations.

And we look at behavioral tendencies in order to try and test hypotheses about what we think the. underlying emotional states may be, I know it's a fairly long winded reply, but it's, I think it's important. and what we've done is we've now developed this into a systematic approach so that different, clinicians and different scientists can actually follow the same process.

And therefore defend the rationale for their decisions. This is the evidence for it. And yeah, they may have missed some evidence. Absolutely. We've never got perfect information. again, because this is a relatively new field, I developed an interest in a lot of the underlying philosophy, not just of this, but of science as well, much of what we do, you know, from a clinical point of view, we're dealing with N equals one, the individual animal.

And so, you know, if you just look at what happens on average in a population, that can be misleading. If you think about it, imagine a graph where you've got. Uh, an event that very rapidly or something very rapidly changes in the animal. So for one animal, it happens on, let's say, day 14, another, uh, another member of the same species that happens on day 15, another happens on day 16, another on day 17, but it takes only six hours to bring about that change.

So you've got this very rapid change in behavior, but when you plot the average. It will look like it gradually changes over an extended period of time. And so the average actually masks what is actually happening in biology. So. You know, we've, we've had to sort of step back and, really look at these sorts of issues.

And, you know, things like socialization, which a lot of people consider really important. Again, I've commonly misunderstood because the science is not appreciated. and you know, the work on socialization in dogs was done with isolation experiments. That doesn't tell you what's important. It doesn't experiment, the only really meaningful result is if an animal develops normally, it tells you that certain stimuli are not necessary for normal development.

If an animal becomes fearful as a result of an isolation experiment, you don't know if it's because of the isolation or because of the experience of the end of isolation, Do you want to give you an example on that?

[00:14:06] Guest: Well, let's, I want to kind of pause because there's, there's a lot there and, I want to, I want to go back to some of the things that you said. first of all, I think it's really this point about these three different models, I think is really, really important. And this is something that, I think there's still a lot of misunderstanding about, right?

And this was this, idea of having this medical model and the behavioral model, and then them becoming combined, into something that's a little bit more holistic is something we've seen in human psychology as well, right? And that, You know, moving from these sort of separate disconnected ways of looking at behavior to something that is more cohesive and.

that takes into account all of these different factors that influence behavior because behavior is in fact very complex and we simply cannot simplify it into as you said this biological marker or just learning and learning is absolutely very important and biology is absolutely very very important but if you only look at each one of those things individually We're missing a whole picture of what is motivating behavior and I, I really agree with what you have to say about looking at what is going on in the animal internally.

And this is something I feel like I've talked about this with many different guests because I do think it's very important and I still have a lot of students coming to me and saying Yes, but aren't we not supposed to look at emotions because we can't really know what's going on inside the animal and I'm wondering if you can talk about I mean we're getting We're sort of you know, you've done a lot of work on emotion too, but I want to kind of talk about that Belief a little bit that the fact that we cannot objectively measure an internal state means that we should in fact You Not consider it when we're looking at behavior.

[00:16:18] Host: So I think that's, it's a great point, but my counter to that is most of quantum physics is based on stuff we can't measure. We can only infer from changes that we observe. So we, I've never seen an electron, but I do believe electrons exist. I think most people haven't seen an electron, you know, uh, we only recently, well, we saw evidence of Higgs boson particles, but nobody has seen it as such.

So we can see the effect of these things. And I think this is, this is one of the fallacies in science that people say, Oh, well, you know, you're talking about internal states. What I'm not saying is that there is a specific bit of the brain that does this. And in fact, when it comes to emotion, emotion is a state of the brain.

And when we think about feelings, you know, that is our conscious representation of that and our feelings constantly change. And this is one of the problems with studying emotion, that the actual experience of emotion is constantly changing. and it's not that there is a specific emotion center, you know, people often say, Oh, well, you know, the amygdala is the important part for fear.

Well, it's also important in assessing reward expectancy as well. So, it's because of all of these bits of the brain are busy talking to each other and making predictions, that's what brings about the emotion. But that doesn't mean it's not useful to talk about emotional states. and especially when you put them within a functional framework, say this emotion serves this purpose.

So fear is the emotion associated with protecting yourself from physical harm. Frustration is the emotion associated with having agency in the environment and having control and having predictable outcomes. Now, it doesn't help when we use the same words to describe both of those biological phenomenon.

We often say the animal is anxious and anxious. You know, if you're, if you're anxious about being mugged, are you worried about losing your wallet? We knew it's case you're worried about losing resources and control. That's actually linked emotionally to frustration. Are you worried that you might get hurt?

In which case that is fear. It's the same word at anxious. And we still say, I'm, you know, I'm worried about it, or I'm scared of being mugged. we have to look carefully at the language that we commonly use. And, you know, stress is another classic one that, you know, it has a popular understanding, but that we need to be much tighter when we, use the term in a scientific way.

[00:18:47] Guest: Yeah Yeah, I would definitely agree with that and you know that the function of emotions, right is to motivate behavior and so if we're not looking at emotions, we're missing a Huge motivator of behavior we can look at these external things But really what those external things are doing is triggering emotions

[00:19:06] Host: a slight, I'm going to just interject slightly there. You say the function of emotion is to motivate behavior. Now, as I said, yes and no. And there's a danger when people say that is that they confuse emotion with motivation. The, the state of emotion is to prepare the animal for a range of strategies and a range of behavioral motivations.

The motivations. Link to specific behaviors. So, as I said, you are scared depending on the circumstances you might run, you might defend yourself, you might freeze. all of those behaviors are, a consequence of being in a state of fear, the emotion. The specific motivation, what you do is dependent on the further appraisal of the circumstances.

And your options, it's not that it doesn't directly motivate it sets the, it predisposes the animal to certain types of behavior. And I know that might sound very nuanced and picky of an academic, but I've heard people talk about emotivations or emotions directly motivating this response. And it's not, there's actually, it's a state of the brain.

So it's, it's creating that predisposition

[00:20:17] Guest: Yeah, I would agree with that, right? And if you look at like, Mendel's model, for example, on decision making, that's how he describes it is that Emotions are one of several precursors that influence cognitive appraisals and motivation and therefore influence decision making. And then the outcome of those behaviors, I should say decision making and behavior selection, and then the outcome of those behaviors will be reinforcing or not, and that will then be fed back And influence future decision making.

And so definitely, I think you're right that there can be this concept that there's sort of this direct link between emotion and behavior and that there's actually a lot of things that happen in between that are going to determine the exact behaviors that

[00:21:12] Host: as, as you say, it doesn't just affect behavior. It affects the way you appraise the environment as well. So it affects sensory systems as well as motor systems. And that's important. And that's, that's why it has to be this global state that's, you know. That's interconnected and why the idea of looking for the emotion centers is, is a bit of a false crusade, I'm afraid.

[00:21:33] Guest: Yeah. Yeah. And those are all reasons, right? The fact that it influences cognitive appraisal and perception and all of those things are all additional arguments for why we can't just dismiss emotions as being too hard to measure and therefore something that really shouldn't be addressed because it's, I'm going to go as far as to say that I really think it's a little bit negligent to simply dismiss the role of emotion because it is so important.

[00:22:01] Host: absolutely. I would agree. And I think it's, it's something which, you know, people have sometimes again, misunderstood. They say, oh, well, we've got, we've not got the evidence for it. So we assume it, it doesn't occur. Well, it depends whether you've looked for the evidence and. You know, absence of evidence is an evidence of absence if you've not looked.

and the concept of emotion is a useful concept to explain these things. there is something, and it explains individual differences, why one individual responds differently to the same stimulus, you know, there's a bar of chocolate there, are we going to have a fight over it or is my desire of chocolate so much clearly better than yours that you just back off? So, but there's, that's that individual differences. It's the same bar of chocolate and it's not just determined by how low your blood sugar is or anything like that. There is that intrinsic, which is based on, and again, this, I think this taps into the thing about behaviorism, behaviorism. The focus has been on the stimulus as the control for behavior and that's the immediate antecedent, but actually you decide to do something because of how you process that stimulus in the context of your brain's whole backstory.

And that whole, that backstory is not just your lifetime experience, but also the type of brain that you've got through evolution.

[00:23:22] Guest: Mm hmm. 

[00:23:23] Host: so, that's the reason why we act in certain ways. And that's why predicting behavior can be challenging. And we're looking for, you know, to explain why the behavior occurs in certain circumstances and not others.

Then we have to look at that, that whole backstory, not just focus on the stimulus.

[00:23:39] Guest: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that leads us into some of this work that you have done on emotion, and you've done quite a bit of work on using AI to recognize emotions as well as pain in dogs, cats, and horses. And so how is that being used and what have you learned from that work?

[00:24:03] Host: well, the short answer is I've learned that there's some very smart people who work with AI, uh, that I can trust to do this work. but you know, the, the AI stuff is really based on facial expressions. when we look about trying to assess emotion, I mentioned, you know, say people will be familiar with functional behavioral analysis for motivation.

When it comes to emotion, Shira proposed what's known as component process theory, that actually emotion has a number of effects that we need to pay attention to. So it affects appraisal that we've talked about. It affects arousal, affect behavioral tendencies. and it affects the signals that we produce.

issue. Now, the facial expression is one of those four lines of evidence. And when we try to evaluate emotion, we look at each of those four lines and say, is that evidence consistent with that emotion? If the answer is no, we have to reject the hypothesis and therefore go looking for other emotions to explain what is going on. Now, because you actually need more than just the facial expression, you know, using, being able to predict emotion from a facial expression. Is not going to be, overly specific, but it can be pretty good. The face is the main mechanism we use for communicating, and it is a main mechanism that is used by a lot of species.

however, the face has to be understood in the wider context of other signals being given. So if you're looking at a dog, you need to understand what his tail is doing. What posture is. you know, are his hackles up all those other, and there is sometimes a danger that people latch on to just one signal and say, Oh, that means this, well, we've only got a certain limited number of letters in the alphabets.

We put them together in different ways to make different words. the same goes with signals that if think of each signal as, as like a letter or a couple of letters in the alphabet, then they need to be understood in their broader context. AI and computer vision is starting to really help us in this whole approach because it, it uses independent methods to say, well, predict this is what it actually predicts.

There are various approaches that can be used. So you can supervise it and you can ask the AI to analyze it in certain way. I've certainly spoken to colleagues and say, well, this is the way that we would do it. So can you get the AI to focus on this and see how it works? But there is also what's known as a black box approach where you just say you need to find rules that will allow you to dump these ones in this categories and these ones in this category and see if you can do it and they'll see what it can do and then you give it novel ones and you see how well it performs.

And generally at the moment, we're finding that AI is performing as good, if not better than the average person. so, you know, it's pretty impressive. It's not very good because the average person isn't very good.

Um, but the more we develop the methods for how you can actually make inferences about emotion, then the more we can feed that into AI methods, potentially, in order to improve everybody wants, you know, the bark decoder or the meow decoder, it's not going to be that simple.

[00:27:17] Guest: Yeah, it never is, right? I mean,

[00:27:20] Host: It's what keeps us in the job.

[00:27:21] Guest: to be. Yeah. and so, so what that tells me right off the bat is that, and I mean, these are pretty basic conclusions, but I still think they're important. Is that emotions are or at least something is being communicated via facial expressions because the A.

I. is able to pick up on it and that there are differences, right? That there are distinct categories that they are falling into because the A. I. is able to put them into those categories. and so, and I mean, I think we know this from looking at animals, although I think, so I think with dogs, people are already there, right?

Cats and horses, I think, are in a different place where, there's not as much of an understanding that maybe they have emotions or that they can read them, you know, different facial expressions. or and I'm talking about among the public, right? Is that if you talk to the general public, people seem to recognize, at least in my experience, the presence of a variety of different emotions in dogs more so than they do in horses and cats.

[00:28:31] Host: To a degree, and certainly we did some work where we asked people about what emotions they thought their cats and dogs expressed, and people gave a much wider range of emotions for dogs than they did cats. Um, whether or not those emotions exist is another matter. We do know that. People in, there are certain features, physical features you can pick up, in relation to communication that seem to have relatively universal effects.

So things, you know, vocalizations that go up tend to be associated with higher arousal and more distress. So, you know, a dog that barks and he's distressed, it's likely to be a bark fits. Um, you know, has ascending tones, a dog that is barking in order to issue a threat tends to have descending tones and tends to be lower frequency and that high frequency, low frequency happens across species.

You know, when people get excited, their voice goes up. Yeah. and so people are tuned into that and they can do that regardless of species. I think that is a danger that people over interpret, as humans, you know, we do a lot of cognitive processing and the more that I study cognition in dogs, the more convinced that I actually think that dogs don't do as much cognitive processing as we think in terms of reasoning, that they are incredibly observant and they're very perceptive.

I know not belittling dogs and people sometimes say, Oh, you know, isn't it like, unmasking the magician? And so, yes, but that in itself is really exciting to see how the trick is done. That's just as exciting as the trick, because you know, the trick isn't real. You know. and I think there's a danger and because as I said, we do so much thinking, but actually most of our reasoning is after the event.

We, we can reason in advance. We can think carefully and plan. And. you know, that planning for the future, but actually much of when we say, oh, well, I did that because I thought this, that's an after the event justification, I put my foot on the brake because a child stood up, stepped off the sidewalk into the road.

No, your brain decided to put your foot on the brake and then bothered to tell you about it afterwards, you know, it wasn't as a result of a conscious decision. you know, this, I think is something we often assume that, oh, well, there must be reason and, uh, you know, rationale behind it, as opposed to the, well.

The animal responding to a relatively simple stimuli and working out what the rules are. You know, what, what brains aren't is brains are not simple, passive processes. They're massive predictors. They take all the information of their backstory and they make predictions and they try and find what makes most sense of the world.

You know, we know there are things that go on, you know, brains don't present us with reality. You and I do not hear ultrasound. We know ultrasound's out there, but it's of no use to us generally. So. We're not presented with it. you know, the world we live in is a human reality. It's not a reality or it's not an objective reality.

It's a reality that, you know, has been generated by our brain as a result of selection saying, these are the important things for you to know about. And in that regard with dogs, then, you know, one of the things that dogs have been selected for is to pay attention to faces because faces reveal a lot about humans.

And if you can read your human, if you can, if you can predict your human rather than read your human, because as I said, I think reading would be the cognitive, but if you can predict your human's behavior from their face, then, you know, you get an easy life and some of our 

work. 

[00:32:21] Guest: this is so sorry to cut in, but, I'm very, so I'm very interested in this, this topic, right? Of the how good dogs are at reading human body language and, you know, voice, tonal cues. And, and what you said earlier as well about that you're becoming more and more convinced that dogs don't don't engage in, I'm going to get it wrong exactly how you phrased it, but you said, you know, there's not as much cognitive processing going on, you know, like on a reasoning level.

And I sometimes wonder if basically what dogs got, what they do so well is that they may be sort of like. And I'm kind of going on out on a limb here because there's a lot of information that we're missing, but I wonder if they might be like theory of mind mimics in the sense that, and I'll need to define theory of mind for the listeners here where.

You know, theory of mind is the ability that humans have to make inferences and predictions about what is going on in someone else's brain. And so I just made an inference that not all listeners will know what theory of mind is. And so I am defining it because I am recognizing that the way that I see and respond to the world is not going to be the same way that everyone else sees and responds to the world.

That's more perspective taking, but it's basically the fact that We are able to create a mental model of what is going on in someone else's mind and then use that to, um, influence our own behavior and decision making. And there's a lot of speculation about whether ducks are self aware or not, and I would say we really don't have a clear answer on that at this point. But I do wonder too if if it's not that they don't have sophisticated cognitive abilities in other ways But I am not convinced that they have self awareness, which would be a prerequisite for theory of mind And if they don't however, I think they are very good and this isn't necessarily intentionally on the dog's part But of responding to humans in a way that makes us feel like they understand You What's going on with us?

[00:34:42] Host: Yeah, I would agree entirely because if you think about, you know, brains have to distinguish the social world from the physical world and, but you don't need theory of mind to do that. So if you're walking down a corridor and there's a table in the corridor. You know that you have to step to the side because the table's not gonna move.

Whereas if you identify that thing in front of you, as with four legs as a dog, you've gotta predict its behavior and realize that it's not gonna behave like a, a physical object. It has different, it follows different rules. So the brain has modules for separating out. social phenomenon, which follow one set of rules from physical phenomenon that follow a different set of rules, like the rules of gravity.

Now, you know, people could, people could make predictions about gravity long before gravity was described as a force because you drop something, it goes down. You know, all Isaac Newton did was say, well, why does it go down? You know, and he questioned that. I'm not sure that, you know, most people can understand why gravity occurs.

It's still a mystery, I think to most physicists, even. But, you know, it, it's some sort of attractive force, but, you know, so you, you don't need to understand the underlying mechanisms to make the predictions. And so, you know, dogs are tuned in to all sorts of features in humans. But they don't necessarily appreciate them as that's a human and therefore, you know, that rational bit that goes behind it.

And it's very difficult, I think, for us to tease that out from our thinking, because it is so intrinsic to us that we think like that, that because of this, that, oh, that the dog is rationalizing this, as opposed to the dog responding to certain cues. One of the areas I'm starting to get increasingly interested in is the whole issue of cognitive load.

And I was reading some stuff and it was, I can't remember the actual figures, but let's say your brain can process how many, however many bits of information a second. I know it's a massive number, but let's say it's a hundred bits per second. Yeah.

To listen to somebody talking, you need about 50 bits per second.

So when somebody does simultaneous translation, they are pretty much working at the limits of their cognitive ability. Now, interestingly, increasingly, we're starting to see this in working dogs that depending on what else is going on, their performance may well drop if they're trying to do olfactory tasks, which are really challenging.

That they're diverting so much of their cognitive resources to that little things can have a big impact. So again, it's this idea that you've got to go beyond the stimulus. You've got to look at what your brain's capacity is. You've got to look at the backstory as well. and this is why, you know, I think things like you mentioned in the beginning about discomfort and pain and some of the stuff we've done there.

I think that's why that's important because if you've got discomfort, you're diverting resources quite often to suppress the effects of that discomfort so that. often, you know, you, you might be feeling, you're having a slightly bad day and don't realize why, and then you get home and you got a blinding headache or your brain was busy trying to suppress that headache the whole day.

And that's why you didn't have much patience because you were diverting cognitive resources to that. And so you didn't have the cognitive resources to deal with the normal day to day bustle. and you know, that's the sort of thing that I think is going on. You know, humans are able to make these abstract associations and again, you know, they're so intrinsic to us.

One of the, there's a classic paper and I used to adapt it as a practical for the students and you, you basically, you, you get a platform that you can rotate and we used to use, fishing line cause it was pretty invisible, but nowadays you could do it remote control with motors. And imagine you've got a flower pot on either end of the platform and with your right hand, the dog is facing you with your right hand, you clearly put a treat into the pot in front of you.

So that's the dog's left as they look at it. And in your left hand is empty, but you put it into that pot. If you release the dog, the dog will go to his left to get the treat. If you walk the dog round to your position and release the dog, he will go to his right because he can rotate things when he is moving.

However, if you spin the platform in front of the dog, so he's seen the treat go in and then it has rotated magically. So now the treat is on, your left, his right. I think that was the way I've got it around. Yeah. It's changed sides, but he has not changed his position. The dog gets it wrong. Now, the really neat thing is even if you have a pot at one end of the platform on one side and 12 inches in from the end on the other side, and then rotate it.

So neither pot is in its original position. The dog still makes the same mistake. They cannot rotate in their head that abstract, right? You know, they cannot do that abstract rotation in their head. It's simple for us. And I've tested hundreds of dogs like this I've yet to find a dog that can do it.

And, you know, occasionally I ask people, Oh, my dog can do it. When we control for all the cues, the dogs can't do it. And again, these things that we intrinsically take for granted. It's, you know, there because we have certain abilities that dogs don't. And again, we also have biases that we don't appreciate necessarily.

So, you know, we have a shape bias. Shape is important to us, possibly because we are tool users, the shape of a tool determines what you can do with it, but also because we're hunter gatherers and the shape of a berry is important to know whether or not that red berry is poisonous or whether it's a strawberry. dogs are not hunter gatherers and they're not tool users. What is important to a dog is size, because actually, depending on your size tells me how many of my mates I need to pull you down and eat you. So if you teach a dog that a, with a, you've got a naive dog and you teach it that, this round spherical object is called a ball, yeah. And you just teach it that object name and don't do anything else with it. And then give the dog a choice between a cube that is the same size as that tennis ball and a soccer ball. So a larger round sphere, and then tell the dog to fetch the ball. He will bring back the cube. He won't bring back the football.

For us, the shape would be the linking factor because we have a shape bias, but for a dog, it's size. 

[00:41:22] Guest: Yeah, 

[00:41:23] Host: they, that's their bias. Now, I'm not saying you can't teach a dog that a ball is a spherical object, but that seems to be their default situation. And

so it affects the whole way they see the world as a result.

[00:41:35] Guest: right and these biases Impact our behavior, too. So I'm thinking of Daniel Kahneman's work on you know the the way that the brain functions and the It's the same thing, it's like, so those are things that the dog can and can't do, or does better or worse, and then there's also things that we can and can't do, and, but we don't always realize we can't do these things.

You know, so we may be, and, and actually decision making I think is a good example is where you're talking about the reasoning often happens after the behavior has occurred. And humans tend to think that they're engaging in more rational thought and decision making than they actually are. And there's a lot of research behind this that shows that.

We are making decisions much more based on emotion than we think that we are. Um, and, and that's because our brains are not necessarily set up, you know, they sort of developed pathways and working models that make us be able to reason going back and there's benefits to that in terms of making decisions in the future.

We don't realize, you know, we're just not aware of all of these things. And then when we look at dogs or horses or cats or whatever species we're talking about, we're making assumptions about what they can and can't do. And then those assumptions and those biases are often reinforced. Because now we're more aware of stimuli or confirmations of those biases and we may not notice the things that disprove

[00:43:18] Host: Yeah, absolutely. And we're all subject to confirmation bias. That's what brains do. They're trying to predict what works. and that's why as scientists, you have to step out of that and, you know, You're quite right. You know, the reason why Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel prize was he sort of pointed out that humans are not rational in their behavior.

but because we think about rationality the whole time, we, that, that was a fundamental problem with, economics. If, you know, you see somebody walking towards you, you might say that's a woman walking towards me. And I say, why do you think it's a woman? And you say, well, they're wearing a skirt. Their face looks like it's female, whatever.

They are not the cues we use actually to determine, you know, fundamentally that it's a female walking towards us. You, we, you know, vision doesn't do that whole processing. That's what gets stitched together at the end of it. what we're looking for is things like the way that different light, dark contrasts are changing, and that's what gives us the illusion of motion.

And we look at things like where in effect, where the shoulders are versus the hips are and relative movement. And that's what tells us actually that we, that's what sets up the expectation that that is a female. Now you can look more closely and you can look at that detail and say, yes, that is female or that is male.

but actually the intrinsic processing that the brain is doing is on the ratio of things like shoulders to hips and the way that the limbs are moving relative to each other, And, we know this goes across species. We did some work and it's what called biological motion. You may have seen these dots.

I'm sure if you want to put in the show notes, you can just Google some sites for biological motion so people can see this, but you see some dots moving on a screen, you say, yeah, that's a person walking sideways or that's a person walking towards me. We did a similar thing with dogs, and we found that dogs responded to it as well, and that's not surprising that they use these simple features, but the really interesting thing in that piece of work was that when we did the, when we sort of looked at the temperament of the dogs, we found that.

Dogs that were sort of more anxious without going into too much detail. Not only did they respond and pay more attention to the dots that looked like a person or a dog walking towards you. They also paid a lot of attention to the ones going across the visual field. Whereas people and normal dogs tended to largely ignore those dots, that, that pattern, because, you know, it's not important if you're not coming towards me.

Whereas if you're anxious, so if they're spending all their time looking at these things that largely are not important, it's not surprising that they're more grumpy because they're using their resources the whole time to study things that we would probably not pay attention to.

[00:46:12] Guest: Right. And that comes back to that cognitive Absolutely. That's about earlier. Interesting. Yeah, and that makes me now, you know, now I'm wondering about the impacts of things like spending larger amounts of cognitive load on monitoring potential threats or Coping with pain and how that might then also impact sleep I don't know if you have any thoughts on that But that's where that's where my brain went is how that could impact sleep which is then going to have additional impacts on You know behavior and cognitive load later on

[00:46:47] Host: Well, if you don't feel safe, you can't go into deep sleep. and, you know, but how do you feel safe? if you're a social species. You can get a, for want of a better term, a sense of safety and security from others. so if you trust somebody else to look out for you and, you know, just in, in wake animals, we know, you know, things like geese, you know, who's looking around versus who's grazing, depends on the ratio, the amount of time you spend looking out depends on the number of people you're surrounded with, um, if you do not feel secure in your home, you're not going to sleep as well.

You know, we've all had worrying nights where we've worried about things, or we heard something downstairs and we can't get back to sleep. So you're, we're not going to be able to switch off if you know, and therefore, and you're unlike, even if you do switch off, you're unlikely to enter deep sleep and deep sleep is really important because that's the time when your brain uses those memories and builds other associations.

So the initial phases of sleep are important for that initial memory consolidation, and being able to make explicit recall of, uh, information and experiences from the waking hours. The deep sleep, the rapid eye movement, sleep dreaming seems to be important in that processing and building associations between that information and established information.

So that's, you know, so sleep is really important, across 

[00:48:14] Guest: Yeah, right, right, exactly. So there's a couple things I want to touch on before we wrap up And we had been talking about dogs responding to human facial expressions and how much they understand about that and you've actually done some work on this on how dogs respond to Human facial expressions human emotion and can you talk a little bit about what you guys have found in that research?

[00:48:42] Host: So. One of the things that we found, which I think was really quite important, as I said, dogs are trying to make sense of the world and we use categories to make sense of the world. You know, those things we label as blue, those things we label as yellow, that's their categories. I'm colorblind, so I struggle with certain categories, but what we showed was that dogs seem to have a functional category for emotion, at least positive versus negative.

So they bring information together from different sensory channels. So the visual field and the auditory field and say, those go together. and they go together on the basis of, of some similarity. Now, you know, there's no reason why. An angry face should be linked to an angry voice, and if, you know, just intrinsically so that, but if you can link them together on the concept of angriness, now, obviously you could just do that as a result of experience.

But what we did is we used a language that the dog had never heard. The work was done, with Brazilian colleagues. And so we use Portuguese for the dogs, which the dogs had never been exposed to. So they were picking up on certain features and knitting that together with the facial features. So that suggests that dogs must have a concept of emotion, at least as a category that they classify stuff.

and as I said, the more that we've looked at this, the more we realize that dogs really focus. And I, I find it interesting. And sort of somewhat amusing when I read some research and people say, well, the research has kept a neutral face to avoid influencing the dogs. There is no such thing as a neutral face to a dog.

You're either happy or you're not happy. You're either positive or negative at the very least. And we, we found, you know, when we presented dogs with neutral faces, they classified them as if they were negative emotions, a blank face is weird. You know, well, when does the dog ever see a blank face?

It's not neutral. That's sort of, that's not right. You know, so that's a potential negative, stimulus. So, you know, that's quite important, to appreciate that, you know, as scientists, sometimes we want to put in these controls, but we're actually creating and dogs will particularly tune in to the emotion rather than the motivation.

So another study that we did where we, had. two actors who looked quite similar, they, and we got them to dress up in black. This is actually the same research and Talia Albuquerque. I should give her a particular credit for these studies. And we basically had one that was a giver and one was a receiver.

and there was, we've put in various controls, but the simple version is basically the dog has to ask somebody for help to get to treats. Now, if I tell you one's a giver and one's a receiver, who are you going to go to?

[00:51:25] Guest: Probably the giver.

[00:51:27] Host: Cause we will, we will read their intention and do that. we had that and then we put different types of face. We put neutral, we put happy, we put, angry faces and the emotion of the person trumps everything. You go to a happy person because happy people are providers, even if they're receivers.

So they're not, you know, and that's the world that dogs live in. You know, you want a happy dog, be happy around your dog. and this is one of the hardest things that we sometimes ask, you know, owners of dogs with problem behavior. If they're not happy, then they're adding to their dog stress. and you know, if they don't believe that the issues with their dog can change, then they're not going to change because they're going to be nervous.

Now it's perfectly reasonable. If you've got a dog that flies off, you know, when he sees another dog, It's perfectly normal for you to be anxious, you know, about your dog around other dogs, but if you've got the, you know, your dog, under control with a decent lead and collar, then you need to learn to relax and you'll be surprised how relaxed your dog becomes because dogs use humans as a point of social reference.

Another common mistake that people make is that when their dog is scared, they try to console him. And they think they're reassuring the dog. But what the dog sees is that when that scary things happen, my human goes all small and curls up into a ball and speaks quietly, so they must be scared. That adds to the stress of the dog because they're taking their cues from their human.

Whereas if you acknowledge sort of, Oh, what was that scary noise? And then act in a jolly way, the dog is much more likely to recover from that situation rather than feed from it.

[00:53:02] Guest: Or at least act relaxed. you know, that like, Oh, hey, you know, 

[00:53:07] Host: But they process it and they remember it. So it will shape future behavior.

[00:53:11] Guest: Right. I noticed it. So I have a dog who I talk about a lot because he's, he's a very unique individual, but He's an Australian Shepherd. He has extremely high arousal level, like more so than just about any dog I've ever worked with. And he's on medication through veterinary behaviors. And he, as far as I can tell, he really truly likes people and is very pro social.

but it doesn't take much for his arousal to get to the level where it sort of starts tipping over into something else. But what I have noticed is if we have someone that is outside or they're approaching our house, for example, Based on how I respond, his, we were talking about vocal tone and pitch earlier, his pitch will change dramatically.

So if I come in and I say, even I'm neutral, I say, no, it's fine. Or, you know, I mean, I don't really yell at him, but if maybe if I speak sternly or something, His barking, or if I act concerned for sure, his barking will remain in that lower register, whereas if I behave as if I'm super excited, there is someone outside, he will go into much more high pitched and be, you know, vocalizations and much looser body language.

And it's, I mean, I can almost intentionally control the A pitch of his bark based on how I'm responding and he's You know, I don't know if all dogs it's quite that dramatic with but 

[00:54:40] Host: Well, 

[00:54:41] Guest: that is very

[00:54:43] Host: dogs very much, you know, and again, it doesn't have to be a conscious process, but they very often, you know, they live in this emotional world. And so they often look to synchronize their emotions and when they're, or to try and resolve situations of conflict. So, you know, you, you can hear, you know, people are having an argument and the dog then goes and bites one of the owners.

Well, all the dog can hear is that things are not right. And it knows that things are not right. It's not rationalizing it, but there are two people, having an argument and this is in the dog's home and so the dog is trying to resolve it. So if we actually, if I bite one of them, then actually there's an imbalance now and hopefully that from the dog's point of view, that should resolve things, you know, that's the prediction that the brain makes that, okay, you're back down, therefore, you know, we will resolve.

And we have mechanisms for, if you want a better term for forgiveness, you don't have to think about it as forgiveness, what we call post conflict reconciliation behaviors.

And that means that even though I've been bad to you, I still want you as part of my social group. so that's the way that you can be, for want of a better word, violent in a group and still become part of the group or remain part of the group, which is an important part if you're a social animal, but sometimes from their point of view, they have to use violence to resolve a dispute.

so, you know, dogs are tuned into this and they'll say they detect that something isn't right. but often they want to synchronize with their human. Yeah, if you go, if you go jogging, your dog will naturally do this sort of gambling gate. It's a very positive thing to do. I think we underestimate the power of play, playing with your dog as a reinforcer.

you know, there's too many people that are clicking and treating and not playing with their dog. so, you know, it's that side of things that we really need to look, because the other thing that play does is it builds that bond. It means that you're somebody I spend pleasurable time with. and that's really, really important,

[00:56:39] Guest: Yep. That relationship aspect. I agree completely.

[00:56:44] Host: which is also why physical punishment is a bad thing, because. The whole point is you're trying to build a consistent relationship. Now, dogs are very forgiving, you know, that's not the sort of relationship you should want with an animal. You should want to have an animal that wants to please, not an animal that's afraid to disobey.

[00:57:01] Guest: Yeah. And, and I would argue that when you start adding in physical punishment and other aversives that now what you're doing is you're introducing a lot of, distress into the situation. And now you're having to. Deal with whatever was going on before that was causing the unwanted behavior in addition to the impacts of distress Which is bad stress think of it that way and that has a whole cascading Impact on all aspects not only a behavior, but on the physiology of the animal and so You're really almost creating a situation where you're now having to work against yourself to get the behavior change that you're looking for.

[00:57:40] Host: And if we go back to the issue of cognitive load, you're adding in a factor whereby the dog now has to monitor you because are you going to be the friendly you or the unfriendly you? Um, when actually he should be able to relax when you're about and reliably depend on you. But if I've got to monitor that as well, I can't spend as much time being observant in the real world.

So, you know, being relaxed makes you a better reader of the world.

[00:58:04] Guest: Yes, and, um, yeah, we could go on and on about that, but I know we are approaching time here. I didn't get to ask you about the quote. We can, I still really want to ask that question, but I'm not sure it really fits into the current conversation that we

[00:58:19] Host: Just ask it. That's all right.

[00:58:21] Guest: okay, I'm going to change subjects a little bit because something that you wrote in one of your papers about, really about we need to be thinking about and applying science and research to the practice of animal behavior. there are a lot of really great things that you've talked about in that sense. And one of the things that I think researchers are very aware of is that science is not. an absolute truth. And this is something that I think is often miscommunicated by the media. And you have a quote that says, given the inherent uncertainty of science, it is not surprising that many scientists are cautious about their conclusions. even when they feel they are scientifically justified. However, the cautiousness of the scientists may be no match for the passion or zeal of those with firmly held personal beliefs when it comes to convincing a wider audience who may be more interested in the nature of the debate than the truth of the arguments.

This quote hit me really hard because it's so true. And I'm wondering if you have thoughts on how we combat that black and white thinking that is often incorrect, but zealously argued with the truth when it comes to behavior. And the answer is so often it's complicated. It depends. And we need more research.

[00:59:57] Host: thank you. I think I ought to have that on my gravestone, that quote, it's one of my better bits of writing. I think it's, you know, and it came about because. Well, science is about dealing with uncertainty. The scientific process is about trying to reduce uncertainty. There, there is no absolutes, as you say.

we try to design experiments that make, that allow us to exclude certain explanations. We don't ever find out what is really right. We just say, that's the. You know, the best explanation at the time we mentioned earlier about Daniel Kahneman actually, and there's a famous quote, which I will get wrong, but, basically somebody came up to him and said, have you seen this paper?

They've just disproven your theory. And his reaction, a Nobel prize winner was brilliant. That's what science is about. I just think that's the, that's the attitude we need to have. I need to rethink things when, you know, the evidence points in a different direction. And we reappraise. One of the, you know, there's a great desire, you know, lots of public funds goes on funding scientists.

And so, you know, public should be engaged with science, cause their tax dollars go on on it. So, but, That we are living in, I think what's commonly called a post truth society, where it is all about winning the argument with social media. and I don't think that is healthy for the truth. And I think that there's the strategies there, there are several, points to make.

First of all, we shouldn't confuse. Social media or media with science, and people, you know, I think we're still in the wild west era, but people will get more savvy about social media and how you find out. What is real and what is not, and disinformation, I don't think it's difficult to teach children the difference between belief and scientific knowledge.

I actually think, you know, we could develop curriculums. Where we teach, curiosity in children. That's the thing that really needs to drive it. And how do you distinguish between explanations? Yeah. And you can do that at all levels because children are naturally curious. Sadly, in this country, the education system has moved away from encouraging curiosity into a very factual basis, because that's how schools get assessed.

Do your children pass this test? And so they teach them to the test that I think is perhaps the most damaging thing when it comes to the appreciation of science, that actually, even if you, people still think of science as a knowledge driven discipline, when actually science is a process. Science is a way of exploring the world and trying to make sense of it.

You can have your beliefs, absolutely, and you have to respect somebody who has different beliefs. And just agree, you know, no evidence is necessarily change somebody's belief. whether you believe in a God or not, I don't think we can get definitive evidence if it wasn't an act of faith, there wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be difficult.

and, and that's absolutely fine. It doesn't mean there isn't a God just because we can't prove it. it's just an act of faith and we have to distinguish between those acts of faith. Versus those things where this is what the evidence says, that's the distinction that we need to teach people and we need to identify when people are calling out.

Now, you know, some of the work that I've done has, and I've become increasingly aware, you know, that you're seeing much more of this, the use of lobbyists in science to project a particular view where the goal is to win the argument. It is political. That I, and I just. I stopped engaging with those people simply because it's not about winning the argument.

It's about trying to get across the truth. And it doesn't matter what the evidence is. If somebody has strong belief, my evidence is not probably going to shift them. So it's a waste of time. And if those people are not going to be respectful of me and my, the evidence that I present, then why should I spend my time talking to them?

Now, you know, maybe I should be, as a scientist, maybe something I'll do more when I retire. But I think the fundamental thing is a cultural issue of. You know, that distinction between belief versus understanding the evidence of a particular. And you mentioned earlier, the issue of confirmation bias, our brains are naturally tuned towards, well, this is the evidence that supports this.

you, you may know the, researcher Simon Gadbois

[01:04:29] Guest: Yes.

[01:04:30] Host: um, well, he says that his father always taught him, you know, that, if you've got an opinion, you should research that opinion and find all the evidence to support it. You then go away and do exactly the same process to find all the evidence against it.

So you have the thesis and you have the antithesis or antithesis, and then you do the synthesis, which is where you look for the truth that is somewhere between those two extremes. Okay. that's what we can teach children to do, um, because they're constantly being only exposed to the thesis and they're not being told this is the antithesis.

Now find the truth. And the truth is usually somewhere between those two extremes.

[01:05:10] Guest: Yeah, and and I think that's something we can all learn, right? Because people aren't learning it as children. And so I see it in college students, undergraduates, and even sometimes graduate students, and in professionals, is that they don't have, they haven't learned how to do that research and back up the statements that they are making. With evidence, yes, but even with a rational argument, necessarily, sometimes they just don't have, they say, this is what I believe, and they don't really have an ability to connect together, you know, a series of statements to back that up. And I, and many people do, right? Like, I don't want at all want to say that, oh, it's only PhDs that have this ability, because I don't think that's true at all.

but definitely, I think that that is a skill that can be taught and and learned and probably our schools are not doing a good enough job of that right now. 

[01:06:04] Host: Yeah. And 

I, 

I 

[01:06:05] Guest: you. Oh, go ahead.

[01:06:06] Host: was going to say, you know, I, I'm not short to offer an opinion, but I often offer an opinion with a view to, and I'm very happy to change it. If somebody comes back, I just don't like there being silence when you're meant to be having a discussion. Okay. And, and a conversation is about entry, you know, if you have a conversation with someone, you should come out of it different to how you went into it.

Otherwise you're dictating or, you know, if you just go in with one view and you come out with the same view. what I'm, I freely admit, I am not quick to pick out the holes in a verbal exchange. I can do it when I see it written and that's why I prefer to write and publish. I, I don't, I like podcasts like this, you know, I like having chats with people where we can explore ideas, but what I don't want to do is have a debate, because I won't perform well and I will let down, you know, the, the science if I'm not careful, and that's, you know, there are much better people that doing that than, than me. so they should be doing it.

[01:07:03] Guest: I think I'm the same way. There's a quote that I'll read, and then we'll do the final question. We'll wrap up. this is a quote from Marilynne Robinson. And she says, science is genius is self criticism when you find out that the universe is accelerating and accelerating in its rate of acceleration.

This is not supposed to be true. And the moment scientists find out that all major assumptions have been overthrown, there's rejoicing in the scientific community. And that is the authority of science for me. And I absolutely love that quote because I think it's so true.

[01:07:41] Host: And that's what good scientists do.

[01:07:44] Guest: Exactly. Yes. So, on that note, what unanswered questions are at the top of your mind right now?

What do you think we should be focusing on next?

[01:07:52] Host: Well, as I said, one of the things I'm starting to get interested in is whole issue of cognitive load and how that affects performance. I'm particularly interested in discomfort, the concept of discomfort, and how it's represented. So discomfort can be internal or external, so it can be physical or psychological, if you like.

But it seems to be processed in this sort of common way. So that, that two of the areas that I'm quite interested in at the moment. But I, you know, I've, I've been blessed that I've, I've been allowed to just explore wherever I happen to have an interest and I can, You know, there's an opportunity where I have a lot of good, uh, master students and graduate students, and so, you know, somebody comes, one of the things we're starting to look at, um, I have, one PhD student at the moment and another one just about to start.

looking at the whole issue of the concept of care and what it means to people. So, this is much more social science y, but, basically it sort of tunes into this, how we use language and it means different things to different people. so we've been doing some work on, you know, we are how people, what people think actually care looks like.

People say, you know, these dogs are parts of their family and they love them dearly, but that doesn't stop them banging them up. In a crate for 10 hours a day. Well, you wouldn't do that with a child. So, you know, where are people, where are people with this and how can we develop strategies to make sure that the love people have for their pets truly translates into proper care for them?

[01:09:18] Guest: Yeah. I think those are all really, really important. I'm particularly interested to see some of this work on cognitive load, but all of it is of great value. So thank you so much for your time. This was an excellent conversation, and I'm sure, that the listeners are going to love it.

[01:09:33] Host: You're welcome. Thank you for asking me.

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