Sociality and Cognitive Innovation -- Part 2

If you wanted to know, from last weeks report, what the urban setting was, from which the urban house sparrows were collected, I can now tell you. Urban sparrows were captured, using a large net, in Veszprem, Hungary (see map, below). I thought the name sounded somewhat familiar, and I wondered if Vera and I passed nearby on the way to collect Esther, 14 years ago. So I looked up its location on a map of Hungary (see below). It is actually to the west of Budapest and slightly south; however we travelled to the

eastern edge of Hungary, near the Romanian border, so Veszprem, it turns out, is not really familiar.

The paper, by the way, was by Andras Liker and Veronica Bokony. It appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106:7893-7898, entitled, "Larger groups are more successful in innovative problem solving in house sparrows".

After collection, the birds were banded (on their legs) so the investigators would know which birds came from what area, and the exact date they were collected. They were brought to an aviary, and kept all together, fed seeds from open bowls, as much as they liked (ad libidum). The birds were kept in the aviary for at least a month before the experiment began, and then at the time of the experiment (one experiment per week), they were separated randomly into different groups of 6 and 2, some of which were from urban setting, some from the country, some were mixed gender, some were all males, some all females.

Each experiment lasted for 3 days. On the first day the open bowls of food were taken away, and in their place was a transparent plexiglass feeder with 16 holes on top, 3.5 cm in diameter, from which the birds could access food. At night the feeder was removed, food was replenished and the feeder was brought back the next morning.

Importantly, mounted on the feeder were 16 transparent caps with little black knobs. These would be placed over the holes on the feeder on the morning of the third day. Why is that important? Because this way by the third day the birds are familiar with the looks of the caps on the feeder, but until the 3^rd day they didn’t cover anything; they were just there. So the first day represented basal, or control, conditions. The birds could access food, they saw the caps, and there was no problem-solving. On day one the birds became acclimated to the feeder and to the transparent caps that were attached but didn’t cover anything.

On the second day, the investigators attached a weird looking item, which they describe in detail, poking out from the feeder. This was meant to scare the birds a little bit, until the birds discovered that whatever it was, it was harmless. They called this a test for neophobia. They did this to see whether being in a group resulted in decreased fear, measured by taking less time than small groups to approach the feeder. They also measured how much time birds in large and small groups scanned the environment, as for predators. In both cases they found no per-capita difference between large and small groups. This ruled out the possibility that large groups were more effective than small groups because they spent less time in fear and worry, and could therefore spend more time attacking the cap.

And on the third day came the key experiment. Each of the 16 holes was covered with one of the transparent caps. When the birds came to the feeder they could not access food until a cap was removed. Would larger groups be more effective in cap-removal? And if so, why?

Why did they do this experiment? What led them to this design? What were they expecting to find? According to their Introduction, they were interested in the important issue in ecology of the benefits and costs of group living vs solitary living. In groups, there is increased competitiveness, but that disadvantage could be offset by certain advantages, such as, a) individuals in a group can learn from one another when, where, what, and how to forage, b) they can exploit food resources discovered by others, c) individual risk of predation decreases in groups, d) time spent in scanning for predation can be decreased, allowing for an increase in foraging time and energy, and e) for hunters, there is higher success.

Groups could also adapt to novel situations more readily, either because they could cooperate, or without cooperation, could benefit from one another’s skills and experience, and possibly copy and learn from it. While this sounds good, the authors note that, “the effect of group size has not been experimentally studied in any task that required the invention of novel animal innovations, and may be important in adapting to novel environments.”

So that sets the stage for this study. On the face if it, it seems like a good study, one that speaks to a major problem in ecology. But, as I suggested earlier, I think the results may be much more significant. I think that what they have shown is that social interactions elicit greater individual problem-solving ability. And if that is the case, if cognitive skills can be increased because of a group setting, then in principle those skills could be directed at the organization of the group itself, which in turn could facilitate further cognitive successes; this positive feedback loop could accelerate, and could possibly account for the evolution of consciousness. I want to continue to explore this by looking at the results of the experiment, and examining how the investigators interpret them.

How were the observations made and what were the observations? Observations were made in two ways. First, there were video cameras recording everything that went on, and then the videos were studied afterwards. And for an hour and a half, the investigator made direct observations behind a one-way glass. After an hour and a half, the experiment was concluded.

The birds found that they could open a well in one of two different ways. They could push at the knob until the cap fell off, or they could peck at the edge of the cap until it loosened and fell off.

Most of the action occurred within the first 30 minutes. By that time wells were opened, and regardless of which bird opened a well, all the birds of the group were feeding. So ecologically it is beneficial for birds to feed in a group, and the larger the better, at least up to 6 in the group. While interesting, that is not what concerns me here. I am more interested in the problem-solving ability.

Here is a key sentence, perhaps THE key sentence, in their Results. “Large groups were significantly more successful in all aspects of problem-solving: they opened 4 times more wells in total, and opened the first well 11 times sooner than small groups.”

Now when you look at that sentence, you can see right away that there are two different types of abilities being described. In the first, the total number of wells opened, both the skill of the original opening a well as well the ability of the other birds to copy that skill for subsequent openings, are described. Once one bird opens a well the other birds see how to do it and can then open more wells. It follows that since there are more birds in the larger group, it is more likely that the larger group will open more wells. One might expect the larger groups to open three times as many well as the smaller groups. The actual number was 4 times as many, not too far off.

But opening the first well -- that can’t depend on copying someone else. That depends on a new application of a skill. One bird, and only one bird, could be the first to open a well. And their results show that larger groups were 11 times more successful than smaller groups. Not 3 times more successful, but 11 times.

Now consider this comment from the Discussion. “An interesting aspect of our results is that large groups were disproportionately more successful in the problem-solving task than small groups. If all birds are trying to get food independently of each other, thrice as many birds should mean thrice as many attempts and assuming random success, thrice as many problem-solving events. According to this expectation, large groups spent proportionately more time on the feeder, and made proportionately more attempts to problem solve than smaller groups. Although this may partially explain the higher success of the large groups it cannot account for their >10-fold faster problem solving… The latter result suggest that the effectiveness of all individuals was increased in the large groups and/or there were a greater number of effective individuals in large groups.” [italics mine].

I italicized this to show that the authors speculated on exactly the same interpretation I offered, namely that there is something about large groups that increases the cognitive effectiveness of the individual in the group. They say “all” the individuals, but I don’t think that was demonstrated. Rather, the cognitive effectiveness of at least ONE individual in the group was increased.

The last part of their last sentence is baffling to me: “or there were a greater number of effective individuals in large groups”. This cannot be. Probabilistically, there are 3 times the numbers of effective individuals in larger groups. Thrice as many effective birds in large groups should mean thrice as many problem-solving events, but they found 11 times the number of well-openings in larger groups. Their alternative “explanation” does not explain their results.

The authors present two possible explanations for their data; one that is really interesting, and the other that is patently false.

Nonetheless, they conclude the paper (and this is the conclusion picked up by the brief note in Science that I discussed last week) by saying “A likely reason for the disproportionate faster and more problem-solving by larger groups is their greater chance to contain skilled individuals, whose quick innovations might then further enhance the group’s success via social facilitation and social learning”.

Isn't that fascinating! They dropped altogether the first, more interesting possible conclusion they spoke of, that individual effectiveness increases in larger groups. Instead, they repeat the second explanation, that larger groups have a greater chance to contain skilled individuals. As mentioned above, they cannot contain more than three times the number of effective individuals, and therefore that cannot account for the 11-fold increase in the speed at which larger groups opened the first cap. And while their assertion that group success is increased via social facilitation and social learning clearly applies to the issue of more problem solving, it clearly CANNOT apply to the issue of faster problem solving.

I wonder if the authors were afraid of their first possible explanation. They probably viewed it as a formal possibility, but one that could not be readily understood, and therefore dropped it. They were probably at a loss when considering how “groupness” could possibly enhance the cognitive abilities of effective individuals in the group. But that is the exciting behavioral phenomenon that this study revealed, and it is exactly the question that we should now be asking.

This study showed that when it comes to problem-solving, 6 is clearly greater than 3x2.

I fear that I may be missing something here, so I am going to write to the authors for their reaction to this analysis.

Stay tuned.

Sociality and Cognitive Innovation -- Part 1

July 20, 2007

A short piece in Science magazine (May 15, 2009, p857) caught my eye . With the strange title of “6 heads are better than 2”, it told of a study on the relationship between group numbers and problem solving ability in house sparrows, the most common bird we see around our houses in the suburbs. The article attracted my attention because I had had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of watching a house sparrow feed its two “toddlers” at my back yard bird feeder. The young sparrows were already capable of some flight, they were large birds, larger in fact than the parent, but apparently they had not yet learned how to feed themselves. They sat on the railing of my deck while the mamma bird (or pappa) took seeds from the feeder, hopped down to the railing, popped the seeds into an open chirping mouth, and returned for more. With two mouths two feed, this went on for some time, several days in a row.

The brief article reported that house sparrows (Passer domesticus), which are gregarious creatures, are able to better solve problems when in larger groups than when in small groups. But the fascinating aspect of this is that the birds were not working together. Rather, individuals in the group solved problems better if the group were larger.

I found myself caught up in trying to understand why.

Birds were captured and brought in from the wild to an experimental aviary where they had access to food from a feeder, presumably not unlike the feeder in my backyard. The birds were then given a problem -- how to obtain food from the feeder when access to the seeds was blocked by a transparent lid. Clever birds, they learned to dislodge the cap, opening the window to the food.

The important finding however was that birds in groups of six learned to remove the cap “10 times as quickly as smaller groups of two birds”. This indicated that individual birds in larger groups are “swifter at solving new problems than in smaller groups”. In addition, birds collected from urban environments were faster at problem solving than their rural counterparts.

One thing was immediately apparent; for house sparrows it is good to be in larger groups, because ALL of the birds in the group were able to access the food more readily once any ONE of the birds in the group could make it available. (And each would likely learn how to overcome that same problem if it arose again). Since birds in larger groups can access food faster, there is a clear evolutionary advantage to being in a larger group. For house sparrows, as for many other species of organism, it is good to be part of a larger group.

But could it also be that the real significance of this study is that it is good to be in larger groups because larger groups provides conditions for eliciting greater brain power among the individuals in the group? This possibility fascinated me. If so, that would be a remarkable finding. It would mean that what was important about being in a group is not so much that access to food improves, but that problem-solving intelligence improves in larger groups, and that socially induced intelligence provides for a variety of different conditions – food access being one – that make group dynamics a clear evolutionary winner. If so, it seemed to me, then this could speak to the early origins of the evolution of consciousness, and provide an understanding of why the phenomenon of consciousness, once it begins, could evolve so rapidly. How so? If the brain is constructed such that social interaction fosters the use of innate intelligence, and if active intelligence fosters the success of the social group, then one could also imagine that that problem solving could operate to better organize the group (eg foster co-operativity), which in turn would better elicit individual intelligence, etc. A positive feedback system could be constructed that could lead, inexorably, to the evolutionary development of the conscious mind.

Is that possible? Is it possible that simply being part of a larger group can somehow automatically elicit greater intelligent behavior in the individual members of the group? Is that why so many people enjoy living in cities? Does living in large groups provide greater fulfillment of our individual potential?

But I jump ahead of myself. This is all based on a big IF, and that is IF social interactions foster greater problem-solving ability in the members of the group, ie that native intelligence is evoked more when in larger groups. This is something that the brief article hinted at when it said that, “the pattern [of quicker problem-solving] was consistent across all individuals in the group”. If I understood that sentence correctly, then all of the birds in the larger group are above average, as Garrison Kiellor quips.

But I am not sure I understand that sentence correctly. What bothers me is that I can’t figure out how the investigators would know that. Once one of the birds solved the problem, all of the birds in the group could have learned that solution by observation. There seems to me to be no obvious way to know whether all of the birds in the larger groups were equally capable of more rapid problem-solving, or not.

So, we need to back up and consider some of the other possibilities for how birds in larger groups could be better at problem solving than birds in smaller groups.

One possibility can be ruled out. The article is not talking about cooperation. In this situation, the birds do not work together to remove the transparent caps from the feeder holes. Also, it can’t be based on experience. Experience could account for the greater success of urban birds compared to country birds, but would not explain why urban birds in smaller groups are not as good in solving problems as urban birds in larger groups. Besides, among the non-urban birds, the birds were set to task without accruing cap-opening experience.

Perhaps we are dealing with a statistical issue here. With more birds at work, it is likely that the larger group would get to the food faster. Or maybe, in a larger group it is more likely that one individual among the group was slightly more clever than average. The brief article in Science doesn’t mention these possibilities, and indeed, they do not seem consistent with the comment that, “the pattern was consistent across all individuals in the group”.

Further confusing things, (to my mind) the article concludes by saying, “Increased success at problem-solving in larger groups may reflect a wider diversity of experience and skill among the individuals in the group… “. But wait… Experience and skill are two different things. Experience depends upon history and learning. Skill can be learned or innate. Experience could explain the urban situation, but it cannot explain the group size differences. Skill, on the other hand, that is what I am curious about here.

“Success in problem solving in larger groups may reflect a wider diversity of … skill among the individuals in the group”, seems to suggest that larger groups succeed better because they are more likely to contain cleverer individuals among them, the statistical argument I mentioned above. That could be interesting, I suppose, because it would demonstrate the benefit of groups to less mentally well-endowed individuals. But it would be really important if the problem-solving skill observed in the larger group may reflect a new phenomenon, that being in a larger group can elicit better problem solving skills among the members of that group. Do you see the difference? The implications of the latter are far more significant, as I discussed above.

The next step is to read the original article, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in order to see what is really going on here. I will report next time on what I learned. I can tell you now, though, it does seem that, when it comes to social living and cognitive innovation, 6 is greater than 3x2.