Beastly Modernisms: The Question of Animal Speech and Psychology in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

This essay analyses the ways in which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf addressed from a very early stage key issues related to contemporary posthumanist theories such as the question of animal speech and psychology. Both Joyce’s description of human-animal encounters in Ulysses and Woolf’s depiction of a sentient animal subject in Flush: A Biography at first present, and then subvert, the idea of the use of language as evidence of a human surpassing of the animal. By challenging preconceived notions of species distinctions, these authors ultimately decenter the human to focus instead on the centrality of animal subjectivity and sensory experience. While the question of a sharp divide between human and nonhuman animals along the axis of speech can be traceable to the anthropocentric tradition of western humanism and not least to such a possible source as Cervantes (whose novella “The Dialogue of the Dogs” is listed as part of both Joyce’s Trieste library and the library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf), the idea of expanding the typically modernist focus on inner life by also including other forms of subjectivity may have derived from the coeval, burgeoning fields of zoology, ethology and comparative psychology. Drawing from these sources and popular areas of knowledge which formed part of the cultural climate of the time, both Joyce and Woolf explore cross-species intersubjectivity in ways that shift the terms of representation away from anthropocentric views in order to affirm, blur and deny the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Direct Approach or Detour: A Comparative Model of Inhibition and Neural Ensemble Size in Behavior Selection

Organisms must cope with different risk/reward landscapes in their ecological niche. Hence, species have evolved behavior and cognitive processes to optimally balance approach and avoidance. Navigation through space, including taking detours, appears also to be an essential element of consciousness. Such processes allow organisms to negotiate predation risk and natural geometry that obstruct foraging. One aspect of this is the ability to inhibit a direct approach toward a reward. Using an adaptation of the well-known detour paradigm in comparative psychology, but in a virtual world, we simulate how different neural configurations of inhibitive processes can yield behavior that approximates characteristics of different species. Results from simulations may help elucidate how evolutionary adaptation can shape inhibitive processing in particular and behavioral selection in general. More specifically, results indicate that both the level of inhibition that an organism can exert and the size of neural populations dedicated to inhibition contribute to successful detour navigation. According to our results, both factors help to facilitate detour behavior, but the latter (i.e., larger neural populations) appears to specifically reduce behavioral variation.

Making drawings speak through mathematical metrics

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child’s skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to two different datasets (N = 65 and N = 345) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with colour metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. These analyses differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We have already discussed the perspectives of such findings in Comparative Psychology and Evolutionary Anthropology.

What Behavioral Abilities Emerged at Key Milestones in Human Brain Evolution? 13 Hypotheses on the 600-Million-Year Phylogenetic History of Human Intelligence

This paper presents 13 hypotheses regarding the specific behavioral abilities that emerged at key milestones during the 600-million-year phylogenetic history from early bilaterians to extant humans. The behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive faculties of humans are complex and varied: we have abilities as diverse as map-based navigation, theory of mind, counterfactual learning, episodic memory, and language. But these faculties, which emerge from the complex human brain, are likely to have evolved from simpler prototypes in the simpler brains of our ancestors. Understanding the order in which behavioral abilities evolved can shed light on how and why our brains evolved. To propose these hypotheses, I review the available data from comparative psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.

Doing Reliable Research in Comparative Psychology: Challenges and Proposals for Improvement

Unlike some other areas of psychology that have experienced a ‘reproducibility crisis’, the ex-tent to which research findings in comparative psychology are reliable is only just beginning to come under the spotlight. I outline what is known about where we as a field stand in terms of the reliability of our findings, and highlight some characteristic features of our research that give may cause for concern, focusing primarily on experimental comparative cognition. I then dis-cuss ways that we as individual researchers and a wider community can take steps to improve our current practices (and in some cases already are), as well as highlighting the crucial role insti-tutions and gatekeepers have to play in effecting change. By tackling potential issues head on, the field of comparative psychology can have more confidence that our research findings and the resultant claims we make about animal behaviour and cognition are reliable.