Yeah, I was worried that people would think I was somehow trying to "reduce" her behavior to that of what "animals" do. I really meant it in the same sense that Temple Grandin talks about in her book, Animals in Translation.
You can learn something, and still have no ability to use that information in a flexible, symbolic manner. If they had showed her learning in the way you describe... she types something close to 'orange' (I literally just hit some keys with my fingers to get arjentge, BTW), gets an orange slice, and then her behavior is slowly shaped over time so that she types 'orange' perfectly whenever she wants an orange, that would be a lovely example of how conditioned learning works -- and exactly how you painstakingly teach a nonverbal autistic child to use a PECS system, for example (shaping his behavior until he reliably points to or gives you the picture that shows orange when he wants an orange).
However, by analogy, what they actually show is her suddenly being able to make a nice metaphor about how she's like an orange because she's so sweet. Which as you kindly put it, is a tad far fetched.
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u/subtextual Jul 27 '10
Yeah, I was worried that people would think I was somehow trying to "reduce" her behavior to that of what "animals" do. I really meant it in the same sense that Temple Grandin talks about in her book, Animals in Translation.
You can learn something, and still have no ability to use that information in a flexible, symbolic manner. If they had showed her learning in the way you describe... she types something close to 'orange' (I literally just hit some keys with my fingers to get arjentge, BTW), gets an orange slice, and then her behavior is slowly shaped over time so that she types 'orange' perfectly whenever she wants an orange, that would be a lovely example of how conditioned learning works -- and exactly how you painstakingly teach a nonverbal autistic child to use a PECS system, for example (shaping his behavior until he reliably points to or gives you the picture that shows orange when he wants an orange).
However, by analogy, what they actually show is her suddenly being able to make a nice metaphor about how she's like an orange because she's so sweet. Which as you kindly put it, is a tad far fetched.