Nonverbal Rationality? 2-Year-Old Children, Dogs, and Pigs Show Unselective Responses to Unreliability but to...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Comparative Psychology
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Philosophical theories often link reflective thinking to language.
• This perspective struggles to explain cognitive abilities in non-verbal subjects like infants and animals.
• A need exists to investigate basic reflective processes across species.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the processing of undermining defeaters, a fundamental aspect of reflective thinking.
• To investigate whether non-linguistic subjects can recognize and respond to unreliable information sources.
• To challenge language-centric models of rational thought.

Main Methods:

• The study involved 36 two-year-old children, 39 dogs, and 21 pigs.
• Subjects observed two informants, one consistently reliable and one unreliable, indicating locations on screens.
• Changes in subject following behavior across trials were analyzed to infer reliability assessment.

Main Results:

• Willingness to follow informants did not significantly differ between reliable and unreliable sources initially.
• A decrease in following behavior in later trials was observed, suggesting a response to uncertainty or defeaters.
• This indicates a potential capacity for processing undermining defeaters across species.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that basic reflective thinking, specifically processing undermining defeaters, may not be exclusive to language-users.
• This challenges the necessity of language for certain forms of rational thought.
• Further research is warranted to explore the nuances of comparative cognition and rationality.