When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
Cats and dogs rely on other senses such as smell and hearing a lot more than humans, who are very visually focussed. They just "see" the world differently and might not be that excited about something that mainly revolves around visual stimuli. I suppose a theoretical cat or dog TV would included a lot of smells, which might not be something you'd actually want in your living room...
The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
> The connection to selfies is really weak. It's just classical conditioning.
Isn't the idea that the compulsion to take a selfie being classical conditioning the very point of the piece?
Isn't basic conditioning the point the artist is attempting to make? I interpreted the project as pointing out that social media uses fundamentally similar reward mechanisms as we use in training animals
Yes, and I'm saying I'm finding his point weak. It is a old and well know experiment and the social-media-is-a-skinnerbox talking point is as old as social media. I find the selfie angle tacked on without adding or illuminating the subject further. The work doesn't work for me. But I appreciate the cute rat photos.
> Yes, and I'm saying I'm finding his point weak.
This would be a stronger point itself if you didn't succinctly validate it with the second sentence of your initial post!
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) it's not the first time that question has come up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Note that this also may have implications for AI-generated work. Here's how, ignoring the many legal theories, it's handled in practice in the US right now: > On 21 August 2014 the United States Copyright Office published an opinion [..] to clarify that "only works creat…
> Here's how, [...] it's handled in practice in the US right now:
Forgive my ignorance of the nuances of US copyright enforcement, but in what form is the opinion of the US Copyright Office important? The US joined the Berne Convention in 1989, which includes automatic copyright protection without the need to register anything. And if you believe somebody violated your copyright you take them to court, which also doesn't involve the US Copyright Office. Unless they release actual regulation I don't believe their opinion on how to interpret existing regulation really matters, or am I missing something?
When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
My sisters dog will bark incessantly at the TV if there are specific animals on the screen, such as horses and elephants. Surprisingly, cats and dogs are allowed.
The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
It's an artistic remix of the classic Skinner Box experiment. The creator is an artist, not a scientist, and his point is being artistically rather than scientifically. As a sidenote: Social media has been described as a skinner box a million times before, but expressing it literally like this is, IMO, clever, interesting, and also cute. The idea using scientific experiments as metaphor to make art is cool, and I hop…
I don't know, it seems a bit dishonest to imply that the rats wanted the selfies(I got that impression), when all they wanted was pressing the button, because they learned, it would produce treats reliable, and later at least sometimes. If at some point, there never would be treats coming anymore, that would uncondition themself and at some further point, they would not care about that stupid button anymore. Unless of course, they would have nothing else to play with. (Is that also a metapher about FB?)
When I was a kid I was taught by every adult that "humans cannot discern more than 24 fps". Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame". So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps. Same when little Windows 95 util…
The claim that nobody could discern more than 24 fps is an odd one (and not one I've ever heard), since it's been generally known that's not true even back before 24 fps was chosen as a standard. Originally some (including Edison) wanted to standardise on higher frame rates for better motion. 24fps was basically compromise to balance against the amount of film used, being fairly close to the minimum speed that was co…
> being fairly close to the minimum speed that was considered satisfactory for motion.
Basically that: It's a repeated and extremely common misunderstanding of the actual claim, that 24fps is right about the threshold between interpreting a series of images as motion instead of a series of images.
A lot of people assume that once you see it as motion, there's nothing more that can be gained.
When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
My sisters dog will bark incessantly at the TV if there are specific animals on the screen, such as horses and elephants. Surprisingly, cats and dogs are allowed.
My aunt’s dog does the same! Horses are not allowed nor are people swimming in any way on TV. The dog also seems to prefer when the actors have British accents.
When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
When I was a kid I was taught by every adult that "humans cannot discern more than 24 fps". Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame". So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps. Same when little Windows 95 util…
Indeed, I think that you can definitely see the difference between 25 and 50 fps... even 24/25 fps and 30 fps don't exactly look the same.
The 60/72/75/... Hz (some screens could display 85 or even 90 Hz) of the Windows 95 epoch was the refresh rate of the CRT tube: the higher, the less flicker. Once you tried 75 Hz, you clearly didn't want to go back to 60 Hz (or at least, that was my experience).
It may have been true during the days of CRTs. I have had a lot of pets and don't remember any of them showing interest in the televisions whatsoever, other than a source of warmth. And that is definitely no longer true.
The observable non-reaction was true, what was not true was the cause, which is the low frame rate. This is the problem with this kind of thing so often, people observe something and an explanation that sounds completely logical gets spread around.
I remember a friend's cat following the mouse pointer on an Amiga with a CRT monitor. When moved off the bottom of the screen, the cat would go right up to the screen and try to peer down to see where it had gone.
Not sure about dogs, but cats definitely could see a plain 60Hz CRT display... atleast some of them anyway.