I think I figured out the solution to the problem, and it is really very simple, and very much significant to the issue of the evolution of consciousness in the context of sociality.
The problem is, how can organisms, any organism, demonstrate better (quicker) problem solving ability when part of a larger group than a smaller group.
We are not talking about learning through copying since the removal of the feeder caps , in this case, is a novel event. It is a first time problem solving for the bird that solved the problem. He or she had no one to learn it from.
And the “genius” explanation doesn’t hold because proportionately there should be no greater number of innovators in groups of 6 as compared to 3 groups of 2, yet the groups of 6 were almost 11 time more effective in the speed at which they removed the caps to the feeders allowing access to food (for all the members of the group).
I love problems like this because they seem almost mystical. Just being in a larger social setting the birds become cognitively more skilled? But, there is a non-mystical explanation. Whether it is correct or not we shall have to see.
I would like to suggest that what the birds in larger groups were seeing was not problem solving but the effort being made to solve the problem. They were copying and learning, according to this interpretation, but what they were copying was the not the solution but the behavior of solving, the effort being made to get to the food.
If there are only 2 birds in a group then all that any bird in that group observes is one other bird pecking at the cap among all the other things that that bird is doing. But in groups of six each bird sees 5 other birds pecking away at the feeder. If, in response to this level of activity, each of the birds began to increase its pecking activity (effort) even a little bit, a positive feedback loop would begin, and the pecking effort made by members of the group would be greater than the sum of the pecking effort of six single birds (or three pairs). A multiplier effect would occur, the result being a highly increased amount of pecking. The more pecking, the faster the caps would be removed, the faster the problem would be “solved”. A decrease in the latency period till first opening would be experienced, exactly the results reported by Liker and Bokony.
There is a connection here to human behavior, and probably the behavior of many other neurologically advanced organisms as well. It is like what might occur, for example, at a political rally where the fervor of expression increases, at least up to a point, as the number of participants increases. Or at an athletic event where each person’s motivation and effort is increased by the impact of the effort and motivation among the others. We see a similar effect at prayer sessions, where the experience of an attendee can be intensified by the intense expression of others in the group. The strength of our actions can depend on the strength of the actions in the group we are part of.
It is possible now to make a specific prediction. If my “increase in effort” idea is correct, if pecking frequency increases in large groups, by virtue of copy behavior, then the average per capita number of pecks per minute at the cap till the opening of the first cap would be greater for birds in the group of six than in the group of two, and would likely increase with time during the latency period. And that can be readily measured. Isn’t that nice?
Did that actually happen in the experiment in Hungary? Did Liker and Bokony report those data? I examined their paper again to look for the data (see their Table 2).
Attempts and success of small (2 birds) and large (6 birds) house sparrow groups during the first 30 min of the problem-solving test
| Dependent variable | Small groups | Large groups | F1,13 | P |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total no. of wells opened in the group | 0.29 ± 0.18 | 2.71 ± 0.42 | 27.97 | <0.001 |
| No. of birds trying to open the wells | 1.86 ± 0.14 | 5.00 ± 0.38 | 60.50 | <0.001 |
| Proportion of birds trying to open the wells | 0.93 ± 0.07 | 0.92 ± 0.04 | 0.02 | 0.879 |
| Total no. of attempts to problem solve | 10.57 ± 3.57 | 38.86 ± 8.7 | 9.05 | 0.011 |
| Total no. of attempts to problem solve before the first opening | 9.86 ± 3.36 | 15.86 ± 5.66 | 0.83 | 0.380 |
| Per-capita no. of attempts | 5.29 ± 1.79 | 7.05 ± 1.59 | 0.57 | 0.466 |
| Per-capita no. of attempts before the first opening | 4.93 ± 1.68 | 2.81 ± 1.07 | 1.13 | 0.309 |
| No. of birds opening the wells | 0.29 ± 0.18 | 2.29 ± 0.18 | 58.8 | <0.001 |
| Proportion of birds opening the wells | 0.14 ± 0.09 | 0.43 ± 0.04 | 7.96 | 0.015 |
| Proportion of tryers succeeding to open | 0.14 ± 0.09 | 0.48 ± 0.05 | 9.70 | 0.009 |
| Per-capita no. of wells opened | 0.14 ± 0.09 | 0.51 ± 0.09 | 8.33 | 0.014 |
| Group's total time spent on feeder, s | 279.6 ± 77.1 | 1003.4 ± 138.3 | 20.92 | 0.001 |
| Group's feeder bout length, s | 31.7 ± 7.6 | 142.4 ± 37.8 | 8.29 | 0.014 |
| Individual's total time spent on feeder, s | 168.1 ± 54.4 | 431.6 ± 63.0 | 9.86 | 0.009 |
| Individual's feeder bout length, s | 23.4 ± 5.5 | 59.7 ± 5.9 | 13.91 | 0.003 |
| Individual's feeder bout length before the first opening, s | 22.3 ± 4.9 | 11.3 ± 2.4 | 4.79 | 0.049 |
| Group's latency to first visit the feeder, s | 98 (48–1,490) | 93 (0–366) | 26.5 | 0.848 |
| Individual's latency to first visit the feeder, s | 131 (48–1,658) | 116 (0–869) | 21.0 | 0.710 |
| Individual's scanning rate, no. of scans/s | 0.33 ± 0.03 | 0.28 ± 0.02 | 2.86 | 0.117 |
| Individual's scanning rate before the first opening | 0.32 ± 0.02 | 0.30 ± 0.02 | 0.21 | 0.652 |
Data are reported from the analyses of video recordings of 7 small and 7 large groups. Statistics are shown for the effect of group size in the final models. For latencies to visit the feeder, median (minimum–maximum) values and results of Mann–Whitney tests are given because normality and homoscedasticity were not held in these cases.
They do point out that in both small and large groups, just about every bird made some attempt to open the well. They also measured the per capita number of “attempts” to problem solve before the first opening, which sounds like a measure of the effort made. I would expect to see more attempts made, per capita, in the larger group. But, as you can see from Table 2, that is not what they report. In fact, it seems like just the opposite occurred. Before the first opening, birds of small groups made an average of about 5 attempts per bird, while birds of large groups averaged only about 3 attempts per bird. So, going by the number of attempts to problem solve, the data do not support my suggested solution to the problem. In fact they do just the opposite. At the feeder, there were 18 attempts by large groups, and 10 attempts by small groups.
But what exactly do the authors mean by an “attempt” to solve the problem? How closely related is an “attempt” to pecking “effort”?
Alas, if pecking number was measured (and I think the data must be available in their videos) it was not reported, and quite purposefully so. As the authors say, “repeated pecks at a single lid were counted only once in each bout”, and a reference is given, indicating that that is the established procedure in the field. So a single “attempt” in their data could be 1 peck or 100 pecks; we have no way of knowing. But how can 100 pecks be counted the same as 10 pecks, or even 1 peck. Pecking number, or effort, the one thing that could explain the fabulously interesting result reported, is the one thing that was purposely not measured. Perhaps the authors will go back to their videos and extract the relevant data.
Alternatively, or in addition, there is a very nice experiment that could be done to substantiate and quantify the “effort” hypothesis. Instead of large versus small groups, the experiment would measure the speed of first cap opening among birds with increasing group size, from 1 to 10. If I am right a mathematical relationship between group size and latency to first-opening will emerge, and, based on the data so far, it will not be linear. But the nature of the curve will likely provide information about the nature of the group effect.
Finally, I wonder if this same experimental strategy, with a slight alteration in design, could measure the emergence of cooperativity. Suppose that after a group of birds learned that pecking at the caps could open them, as in the present experiment, the caps were then replaced with caps that required two birds pecking at different spots on the cap simultaneously. Suppose, for example that the cap had two black buttons, one on each side, which had to be pressed at the same time. The first time that occurred would undoubtedly result from an accident, a coincidental pressing by two birds at the same time. Would the birds then learn to work together to remove a cap? Would time before first removal decrease among the same group of birds as the birds learned to cooperate? And if so, wouldn’t it be interesting to know which group size affords the optimal conditions for the most rapid emergence of cooperation?
The group in Hungary is set up to do these experiments. I hope they actually get to do them.
