Should questions be answered that are already be "common sense" but have not been scientifically validated yet or should the focus be on new discoveries?
In the following video I try to explore this question:
Additional information:
Their study design was basically the following. In a training phase the dogs were shown pictures with either happy or angry human expressions on it and rewarded to touch it (either the happy or the angry one) on a touch screen monitor. The trick is that they were only shown either the upper or the lower half of the picture. In the test phase the dogs where then shown either the same part of the picture (upper or lower) or just the left half of faces. (If dogs were shown the same half, it was always novel, if dogs were shown the other half, it could be either novel or from the same faces as in the training phase. The left-half faces were the same the dogs already saw in the training phase but only the left half.) So what is the hypothesis then? The hypothesis is, that if dogs only learn to discriminate the faces based on local cues in the training phase then they should be able to do the discrimination in the test phase if shown novel faces of the same half but not if shown “old” or novel faces of the other half, because there the local cues are not present. To discriminate between faces of which the other half was shown in the test phase the dogs had to learn more general/global cues present in the picture, i.e. emotion.
However, they have four test conditions (novel face same half, training face other half, novel face other half, training face left half) with 11 dogs and 10 trails per dog and condition. So their standard errors are huge and therefore it would but difficult to detect any difference between the conditions, if present. (One could assume that the dogs in the novel face same half and training face left half are better than in the novel face other half condition, because there more cues remain the same.) They shown, that there is no difference, but of course there isn’t. The variation is too big. (Pause my video at 1:50 to see the related figure.)
How did they show that the dogs really decode the emotion and not some other more general/global cue? Well, they rewarded some dogs for touching the happy and some dogs for touch the angry face (problem here: it doesn’t seem to be randomized, the first 9 dogs were in the happy-condition, the next 9 dogs were in the angry condition… unlikely to get that by chance) and their finding was, that in the test phase, the dogs responded slower to the angry face. However, shouldn’t the dogs show the same reaction the in training phase? Another explanation might be, that angry faces are more difficult to decode than happy faces because the cues in happy faces are more prominent (or dogs these dogs had more experience with them).
I don’t argue against the ability of dogs to discriminate human emotions. However, based on the data of their study I wouldn’t bet on their ability to discriminate human emotions from halved pictures of human faces. But it is difficult to argue against that; because not a lot of data are presented (the data are not very detailed at all). (It is just a “report” not an “original study”).
To the problem with the pet-psychics (or pseudo-science in general): Of course scientific findings can’t be hidden just because they might be used by someone in a false way. But uncertainties in the findings need to be expressed and (in general) findings shouldn’t be misrepresented by people reporting them. In this case I think we don’t know much more than before, other than that they developed a innovative paradigm, what is great but what is not what is reported about.
What is your opinion on this topic?
No comments:
Post a Comment