Comparative Cognition

This book introduces cognitive processes and animal behaviour across species, integrating classic studies and contemporary research in psychology, biology and neuroscience.

This book presents an overview of selected topics in comparative cognition, which is the study of behaviour and mental activities in nonhuman animals. Human psychological capacities are often used as a heuristic by comparative cognitive scientists, whose tasks include designing valid procedures for studying species’ sensory, linguistic or manipulatory abilities that differ from those of humans. Nonetheless, researchers have developed many original ways to gain insights into how other species perceive the world, store and integrate information, and communicate. The contributors to this book have all been involved in such work, and will present some of the approaches that have led to clear advances in our understanding of cognitive processes in other species. The chapters integrate a review of past literature with recent work, covering a variety of subject species including birds, domestic dogs and cats, and nonhuman primates. All contributors have worked with or been otherwise influenced by Professor Kazuo Fujita, to whom the volume will be dedicated. Fujita’s openness to research on various topics and species is reflected in the diversity of the chapters presented.The book will be of interest to students and more experienced researchers in diverse fields including psychology, anthropology, biology and veterinary studies.

Animal Cognition presents a lucid and comprehensive overview of cognitive processes in animals--bees and wasps, cats and dogs, dolphins and sea otters, pigeons, titmice, and chimpanzees--and offers a novel discussion of the ways in which Piagetian concepts may be used to develop models for the study of animal cognition.

Rev. ed. of: Comparative cognition. 2006.

With the growing accessibility of original journal articles and papers, a staggering number of professors teaching junior/senior level courses are turning away from the use of textbooks in favor of primary research papers. The Fundamentals of Cognition series covers the main topics in thefield of Cognitive Psychology, and will address the need professors have for a brief, yet detailed, overview of specific topics in cognitive psychology. The books in this series will serve as a unifying discussion of the topic and provide continuity and cohesion to the discussion of primaryresearch papers. These primers will be written by prominent cognitive scientists with the ability to write accessibly about complex subjects. They will capture the current state of this fast moving field and reflect the authors' views.Comparative Cognition has countless connections to the rest of psychology and encompasses the comparative and evolutionary basis of development and social psychological processes as well as every aspect of cognition. Comparative research also provides the basis for the animal models used inbehavioral neuroscience and genetics. This text on the Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition will convey the richness and excitement of this diverse field while addressing the fundamental questions of what makes us uniquely human and what we share with other creatures. Professors' experience withShettleworth's graduate text and her clear, direct, and interesting writing style makes them very excited about the possibility of Shettleworth writing an undergraduate text in this field.

In 1978, Hulse, Fowler, and Honig published Cognitive Processes in Animal Behavior, an edited volume that was a landmark in the scientific study of animal intelligence. It liberated interest in complex learning and cognition from the grasp of the rigid theoretical structures of behaviorism that had prevailed during the previous four decades, and as a result, the field of comparative cognition was born. At long last, the study of the cognitive capacities of animals other than humans emerged as a worthwhile scientific enterprise. No less rigorous than purely behavioristic investigations, studies of animal intelligence spanned such wide-ranging topics as perception, spatial learning and memory, timing and numerical competence, categorization and conceptualization, problem solving, rule learning, and creativity. During the ensuing 25 years, the field of comparative cognition has thrived and grown, and public interest in it has risen to unprecedented levels. In their quest to understand the nature and mechanisms of intelligence, researchers have studied animals from bees to chimpanzees. Sessions on comparative cognition have become common at meetings of the major societies for psychology and neuroscience, and in fact, research in comparative cognition has increased so much that a separate society, the Comparative Cognition Society, has been formed to bring it together. This volume celebrates comparative cognition's first quarter century with a state-of-the-art collection of chapters covering the broad realm of the scientific study of animal intelligence. Comparative Cognition will be an invaluable resource for students and professional researchers in all areas of psychology and neuroscience.

The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals discussed include antelopes, bees, dogs, dolphins, earthworms, fish, hyenas, parrots, prairie dogs, rats, ravens, sea lions, snakes, spiders, and squirrels. The topics include (but are not limited to) definitions of cognition, the role of anecdotes in the study of animal cognition, anthropomorphism, attention, perception, learning, memory, thinking, consciousness, intentionality, communication, planning, play, aggression, dominance, predation, recognition, assessment of self and others, social knowledge, empathy, conflict resolution, reproduction, parent-young interactions and caregiving, ecology, evolution, kin selection, and neuroethology.

Published in 1986, Dolphin Cognition and Behavior is a valuable contribution to the field of Cognitive Psychology.