I don’t worry whether my animals love me, I love them and when they’re eager to interact with me, I know I’m a reinforcing presence in some way. Their precise internal emotions aren’t something I can know; I can only know how they respond to me and change my behavior if the reaction is negative. If Midori loves me, great! If he just trusts me and thinks I’m a good resource for snacks and scritches, also great!

Humans have the benefit of being able to better communicate their inner world to others through language, but language is still a behavior. I’ve always been really nervous about how others feel about me and tend to overthink social interactions, and the realization that I can only respond to others behaviors was really freeing. If someone doesn’t want to interact with me, I can only know that when they tell me. If they don’t tell me, worrying about it isn’t really useful; so I may as well work under the assumption that they don’t secretly hate me, until they tell me otherwise.

So it just really pisses me off when my learning professor writes something like:

The first sentence can be a true statement: she doesn’t believe we learn the same way. But then she shifts from sharing her personal beliefs to offering it as a widely accepted fact. But it’s not a fact.

I am not arguing that we think or learn exactly the same way, but there’s no way to empirically prove that another animal is NOT able to think “abstract, complex thought[s].”

Like Frans De Waal, an important primatologist, discusses in his book, Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?, differences in cognition are probably a gradient like differences in anatomy across taxonomic groups. Grouping it as humans vs. all other animals (not to mention research into plant cognition…) is so odd to me, when it seems obvious that humans and chimps would be far more similar in cognition than chimps and sea slugs.

And De Waal’s other really good point is that when we do an experiment on animal cognition and the species fails: it’s really hard to know if they’re incapable of some cognitive task, or if we’re just bad at designing an experiment to test that particular species (see De Waal’s tool use in primates example). We might be able to prove another animal can do something, but we cannot prove they are incapable of something.

“Humans are capable of more advanced, abstract thought,” is an impossible statement to prove because we’ll probably never know what goes on in a finch or goldfish’s brain. So why even bother worrying about it? It just feels like an inferiority complex where human learning theorists need to know what makes humans special and unique so they make wild unsubstantiated claims to reassure themselves.

Traditional mathematics teaching methods are failing students, remaining largely unchanged for decades despite significant advancements in our understanding of how people learn. While classrooms may feature modern technology like tablets and interactive whiteboards, fundamental teaching practices and materials haven’t kept pace with discoveries in cognitive science. Research indicates that…

I used reinforcement. But, super important is the way I use it.

First, I use little reinforcers that can be delivered and consumed quickly and don’t lead to satiating (getting full or tired of a reinforcer. Good reinforcers for me are things like m&ms, skittles, fries, or sips of a Frappuccino.

Second and most importantly, I am very conscious about my schedule of reinforcement. Here’s why…

See those dips in response in fixed schedules. Thats the amount of time between when you finish the reinforcement and restart the task. Fixed schedules result in this pattern because the initial responses never get rewarded. However, this doesn’t happen with variable schedules. There is no dip in responding where you are convincing yourself to get back to the task and then you end up scrolling Tumblr instead.

So do something like rewarding with one m&m per page read may work if there is a lot of pictures or diagrams and sometimes you only have to read a short paragraph or two. But if your reading doesn’t vary in this way, rewarding per page is going to result in those gaps. Instead, I would reward by # of paragraphs. Sometimes a paragraph will be a full page, sometimes two sentences. So rewarding every 2 paragraphs or so (depending upon how long winded the author tends to be) gives me a variable schedule of reinforcement and none of those pesky gaps.

Third, my computer has a built in program that will convert any PDFs into mp3 files. Then I could listen to my homework while driving or doing chores. I had to train my brain to ignore the references and diagram descriptions and such that it would read out and then I would go back and look through the diagrams later if needed. Not all of the scientific journals articles could be converted but most could with a click of a button. This made college sooo much easier for me.