...Alex pointed out that the dogs sometimes test their owners – taking their behaviour to the edge of transgression in order to build a model of how to behave.
Adaptive potentiation – serious play! Which lead me off onto thoughts of Brian Sutton-Smith and both his books ‘Ambiguity of Play’ and ‘Toys as Culture’. The LIREC work made me imagine the beginnings of a future literature of how robots play to adapt and learn.
Supertoys (last all summer long) as culture!
Which led me to my question to Alex at the end of her talk – which I formulated badly I think, and might stumble again here to write down clearly.
In essence – dogs and domesticated animals model our emotional states, and we model theirs – to come to an understanding. There’s no direct understanding there – just simulations running in both our minds of each other, which leads to a working relationship usually.
Timehop's email today pointed out that last year I was talking about the post above.
Revisiting it reminded me that when I was young I asked something like "why isn't there more research into the psychology of dogs?" "There's no money, no grants - not enough organizations are that interested in it," I remember being told.
This post tells me that people are starting to become interested....
(Side note, it occurs to me that this kind of remembering is precisely what Slavin is talking about in this talk on memory & storage. "Digital things that produce memories, not just preserve them.")
