Have you ever wondered how your furry friends communicate their needs and desires? While we can interpret some animal behaviors, understanding exactly what language animals think in has perplexed humans across cultures and eras.
If you’re short on time, here’s a quick answer to your question: Animals likely think in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, visualizations, and instincts rather than a defined language with grammar rules.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the latest scientific theories on how animals process information and perceive the world around them. You’ll learn why most researchers believe animals don’t have an internal monologue or voice like humans do.
We’ll also compare animal cognition across species and discuss experiments that reveal astonishing intelligence in our pets and wildlife.
The Basis of Animal Cognition
Perception Through Senses
All animals have senses that allow them to perceive the world around them. Their senses of smell, sight, hearing, taste and touch provide the basic information needed for an animal’s cognition and survival.
For example, a dog relies heavily on its powerful sense of smell to gather information about other animals in its environment. A hawk uses its sharp vision to spot prey from high above. The sensitivity of an animal’s senses is closely tied to their cognition and ability to adapt.
Additionally, many animals like dogs, cats and horses have a strong ability for sensory integration – combining different senses to perceive their surroundings. This allows them to gather diverse information and make decisions.
Research shows that some animals like snakes use multiple senses simultaneously to track prey heat signatures. Others like bats and dolphins use echolocation for navigation and hunting. Still, the full extent of how animals experience and understand sensory information remains a mystery.
Emotion and Instinct
Animal cognition is also shaped by emotions and instincts rooted in biology and evolution. Many mammals exhibit basic emotions like fear, anger and affection that guide their behaviors and decision-making.
For example, a mother bear’s protective instinct leads her to fiercely defend her cubs from danger. Emotions like grief have even been observed in animals like elephants that mourn deceased members of their herd.
Innate reactions and reflexes also allow animals to respond instantly to threats, mating opportunities and other key events without higher cognition. Some fish innately know to swim upstream to spawn when conditions are right. Birds follow ancient migration routes they aren’t taught.
While simplistic, these built-in, automated behaviors and drives are essential to animals’ survival and adaptation over time.
Mental Imagery
Higher mammals like chimpanzees demonstrate some capability for mental imagery and abstraction. They can understand symbols, use tools and even learn elements of human languages when trained. For example, the famous chimpanzee Washoe learned approximately 350 words in American Sign Language.
She could even reportedly invent and use terms like “water bird” for a swan.
Such cognitive feats suggest chimps form mental representations much like humans do. However, the extent and complexity still differs as they likely don’t possess capabilities like episodic memory or complex hypothetical scenario building.
While advanced, chimp cognition remains focused on the tangible present rather than abstract introspection or envisioning distant pasts and futures.
Understanding Animal Communication
Body Language and Vocalizations
Animals communicate through various forms of body language and vocalizations. For example, dogs communicate through tail wags, ear positions, growling, and barking. Happy, friendly dogs wag their tails, hold their ears up, and may “smile” by stretching their mouth.
Aggressive dogs growl, raise their hackles, stare, and bare their teeth. Dogs also bark to alert others, show alarm, or display excitement. Cats communicate through purring, meowing, hissing, arching their backs, and moving their tails and ears.
Purring often signals contentment, while hissing indicates fear or aggression. Ears pointed forward or twitching show interest, while ears flat back against the head warn of potential aggression.
Alarm/Food Calls
Many animals have specific vocalizations to signal danger or the presence of food. Vervet monkeys use distinct alarm calls for different predators, with specific calls for eagles, snakes, and leopards. Meerkats use different alarm calls depending on the type of predator and level of urgency.
They also have a specific call when they find food. Some birds communicate the location of food sources to others. For example, honeyguides lead other animals to bee hives through a series of chirps and tweets.
Chemical Signaling
Chemical signals are very important for communication in the animal kingdom. Ants leave pheromone trails that lead others to food sources or new nest locations. Bees release pheromones to indicate the location of pollen sources. Many mammals use urine to mark their territories.
Chemical signals provide a lot of information to other members of the species including reproductive status, identity, location, and emotional state.
Human Interpretation of Signals
While animals have clear ways of communicating within their species, human interpretation of these signals is not always accurate. We tend to anthropomorphize animal behavior and assume human-like characteristics.
However, careful scientific observation is required to truly understand what different behaviors and vocalizations mean for a particular species. With technology like motion tracking, thermal imaging, and audio analysis, researchers can better interpret animal body language and calls within the proper context.
Differences Across Species
Complexity in Mammals vs. Other Taxa
Research shows that mammals like chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants demonstrate more complex cognition compared to other animal groups like reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish (Source). Mammals have larger, more developed brains that allow for advanced capabilities such as long-term memory, concept formation, self-awareness, and emotional responses.
For example, chimpanzees have shown they can learn sign language and respond appropriately to novel combinations of signs, while most other species rely on simple communication signals. Elephants exhibit grieving behaviors when losing a loved one, suggesting deep social and emotional bonds.
In contrast, a reptile is unlikely to have the neural complexity to form deep emotional connections.
Self-Awareness
Only a handful of animals like great apes, elephants and dolphins have demonstrated evidence of self-awareness through mirror self-recognition tests. In a Kanzi, a bonobo ape, learned to comprehend and respond appropriately to novel spoken English sentences by pointing to corresponding lexigram symbols.
This suggests an advanced ability to learn symbolic representation of communication that approaches human language facility.
In contrast, most animals may only recognize cues with an innate, intrinsic meaning. For example, a dog responds to pointing as indicating location, but likely does not comprehend a detached symbolic meaning for an arbitrary visual shape.
Social Learning
Studies have revealed rich social learning capacities in mammals like monkeys, cetaceans and elephants. Vertical knowledge transfer across generations has been observed in wild populations, demonstrating cultural transmission of behaviors.
For example, pods of killer whales teach specialized hunting techniques to their young.
In comparison, reptiles and amphibians have limited social complexity and bonding. Most knowledge is innate rather than culturally learned. So social learning provides further evidence for advanced cognition in mammals versus other taxa.
Experiments Revealing Animal Intelligence
Primate Language Research
Research with primates like chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans has revealed their ability to learn sign language and computer lexigrams to communicate with humans. The chimpanzee Washoe learned over 250 signs, and Koko the gorilla could understand over 1000 words in American Sign Language.
Kanzi the bonobo ape could comprehend spoken English and communicate using a keyboard with lexigrams. These amazing primates have shown an understanding of language structure, humor, and abstract concepts, challenging the notion that language is unique to humans.
Avian Insight
Birds like parrots and crows have demonstrated remarkable intelligence and cognition. Alex, an African grey parrot, could identify colors, shapes, materials, quantities up to six, and understand concepts like bigger, smaller, same, and different. He had a vocabulary of over 100 words.
Studies on crows and ravens show they can solve complex problems, use tools, and remember human faces that threatened them previously. Their impressive reasoning approaches that of great apes and challenges the idea that birds have simple brains.
Canine Comprehension
Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years, leading to exceptional social intelligence and human-like communication abilities. Studies show dogs can learn hundreds of words, interpret pointing and gaze cues, understand object names, and exhibit theory of mind by taking the perspective of humans.
Border collies like Chaser have demonstrated knowledge of over 1000 object names. Dogs even outperform chimpanzees on some cooperative problem-solving tests, showing their advanced social smarts.
Cetacean Cognition
Whales and dolphins have exhibited abilities rivaling the great apes. Bottlenose dolphins can understand sentence structure and grammar, follow multi-step instructions, learn abstract concepts, and cleverly problem solve.
Orcas demonstrate complex vocal learning similar to humans and recognize themselves in a mirror, indicating self-awareness. Sperm whales have elaborate codas for communication. These research discoveries have shattered beliefs that whales and dolphins are simple organisms, revealing their status as some of the most intelligent animals.
Theories on Origins of Human Language
Physiological Adaptations
One theory is that physiological adaptations like the descended larynx and ability to control breathing allowed early humans to develop complex vocalizations and eventually language (Lieberman, 2015).
The larynx allows us to produce a wide range of sounds, while breath control allows us to speak in long, meaningful sentences. These adaptations may have evolved to allow more effective communication, which conferred survival advantages like improved coordination of group activities.
Cultural Evolution of Communication
Another view is that language emerged gradually through increased cultural complexity. As human culture advanced over hundreds of thousands of years, simple vocal communication became more structured and language-like to meet growing social needs (Tomasello, 2019).
This theory sees language not as an adaptation itself, but an outgrowth of cultural evolution and growing social intelligence unique to humans.
Language Gene Hypothesis
Some scientists have searched for specific genetic mutations that may account for the human capacity for language, but results remain inconclusive (Fisher, 2018). The FOXP2 gene involved in speech and language shows some differences between humans and other primates, but by itself cannot explain human linguistic abilities.
It’s likely that language relies on a complex interplay of many genes rather than a single “language gene.”
Brain Lateralization
Humans show brain lateralization where language functions are mostly localized to the left hemisphere. In contrast, studies of other primates show more symmetrical language function (Gannon et al., 1998). This difference in brain organization could contribute to superior language abilities in humans.
However, left hemisphere localization of language may have emerged after language had already evolved, rather than being a prerequisite.
Conclusion
While we may never fully decode animal consciousness, rapidly evolving research approaches how diverse species perceive, feel, and conceptualize the world. As scientific methods advance, we continue uncovering the previously unseen depths of non-human intelligence.
Rather than searching for a definitive answer to what language animals think in, we can embrace the mystery by observing behaviors, listening to vocalizations, and looking for insight into each animal’s subjective experience.
