Staring at Cat Staring at Cat Staring, 2007, by Steve Bishop
If wondering what it’s like to be a bat, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously did in a 1974 essay, no longer sates our appetite for the futile, designing simulations for them might. For more than thirty years now, as chronicled in Richard D’Eath’s extensive review, “Can video images imitate real stimuli in animal behaviour experiments?“, the use of immersive technologies in the study of animal behavior has struggled against an elusive, perhaps ineradicable anthropocentrism.
At first, to be sure, scientists gave little thought to the videographic apparatus and simply used television monitors to test animal vision. But soon enough it became clear that the animal audience neither perceived the image realistically nor responded appropriately. Mate preferences changed, attention levels fluctuated, learning curves emerged and interfered with results. Just what was the animal seeing? they wondered.
With new limitations in place, the overarching goal gradually shifted from simulating natural environments, which remained largely unintelligible, to testing vision and perception itself. In the 90s, a new wave of studies showed that not only do television monitors generally fail to induce a sense of presence, they disturb it tremendously. Diurnal birds, for instance, see ultraviolet light in addition to the human visible spectrum, but since video equipment can’t capture UV — and televisions themselves emit it — plumage patterns become dulled beyond recognition. To say nothing of Wolf spiders (a popular test species), who perceive the world through vibration, vision, and chemical senses, or of certain reptiles, which have three or four cone types, see UV, and also, with the exception of snakes, see (like birds) through oil droplets, assumptions concerning the perceptual systems of other species were revealed to be strikingly anthropocentric and, to make matters worse, difficult to identify.
Even so, the question of how to induce a sense of presence, however limited, in an animal subject persists today. Constrictions, both technological and philosophical, are considerable, however. For one, a global correction of the image is not possible. Adjustments, when possible, must be made for every part of the picture — and there’s no questionnaire for the animal subject to fill out and return for inspection. Retinal analysis is just as uncertain, in that so much processing takes place further down the neural chain. Like so, the scientist’s dream of creating an immersive virtual environment was traded in, piece by piece, for a much more limited, pragmatic approach. Instead of an ‘experience’ or complete ‘world’, the animal would now be submitted to discrete, targeted ‘cues’ designed to elicit specific behaviors. As a result, in part, of this shift, the ethological models on which many of these studies drew took a turn for their behaviorist roots. Invoking ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’ as the key methodological principles, studies would now deploy virtual stimuli in search of a regular ‘innate’ response.
In this way, the old debate over animal consciousness has given way to a more nuanced elaboration of unconscious, physiological states. Factory farms, naturally enough, are interested, and continue to fund a great deal of the research. How, they ask, can multimedia displays be used to induce a greater sense of calm in an overcrowded chicken coop, and so reduce the threshold where costly ‘agonistic behavior’ sets in amongst the population? In spite of these transgressions, however, the question of presence itself has served to open a new space for the study of animals in their full complexity — not as simpler, dim-witted versions of humans, but as beings in their own right, with their own perceptual orientation to the world and their own inimitable ways of life.
