Nicky Clayton: What we don't know about animal cognition

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith speaks with expert in animal comparative cognition, Nicky Clayton...

Chris - It's been wonderful to chat to you, Nicky, and to see how this has all unfolded over the last about two decades in Cambridge. What do you hope now will be the big questions we're going to get the answers to in your field in the next five years or so? What would you, if you could wave your magic grant wand and also your magic 'let's speed up time, let's do time travel' wand and get the answers to so many things. What are the big questions you want to see solved?

Nicky - Well, I suppose there's various things. One thing is to look in more detail at their experiential memories. The kind of memories that we have when we reminisce about the past. We've already shown that they can remember what happened, where and when, and they can remember who's watching. But two cardinal features of our own experiential memory revolve around the subjective nature of remembering the fact that we often have false memories of things that didn't actually happen to us, but we think they did. So I'd love to know whether they have false memories because it doesn't seem adaptive to have false memories. Surely that would lead to all kinds of inappropriate errors. And yet we think in humans, at least, that the reason we have these false memories is because memory evolved with the future in mind. And therefore it's very good at scenario building. And because the future by definition isn't certain, you want to have lots of different scenarios in your mind so that if things unfold in an unexpected way, you can still partially plan for them. And we think that's probably why we get these false memories, because they're very good at having multiple versions of the same thing, rather than a fixed flat rule about what precisely happened. And then the other one, and it's also related to the subjectivity, is this idea that we remember the source of our experiential memories. So, I know that London is the capital of England, but that's a purely factual memory. It's selfless and timeless. I don't remember how I came to know that London is the capital of England, I just know it. Whereas with an experiential memory, you remember how you know the information. Did I read it on the website? Did I listen to it on the radio? Did I watch it in a movie? I will have access to that information. Did a friend tell me? So I think it would be really interesting to know whether the jays are also able to give us the equivalent of saying, 'yes, I saw it or I heard it,' or for a cuttlefish it's, 'I saw it or I smelled it'. So I think there are two kinds of things about experiential memory that would be really fascinating to know more about. So that's one big question I think. I suppose the other one is thinking in more detail about whether we will ever be able to make some inroads into whether or not animals other than human beings are conscious. Obviously when you're talking about phenomenology, like are you aware of what you just saw? Are you aware of who said what to you? When are you aware of your memories? Are you aware of your plans for the future in humans? This is all couched in terms of linguistic things. We talk to one another in terms of sharing our memories and our stories and our plans for the future. It's not clear how one can do that in any animal, including the corvid in the absence of any agreed non-linguistic markers of consciousness. But might we be able to get somewhere through these other roots, through these things like asking questions about whether they know whether they saw it or heard it? Do they have false memories? Are they more confident in some memories and not others? And I think that would make a real inroad to discoveries if we could establish that through behavioural criteria on a firmer footing and have enormous implications for things like animal welfare.