Comparative Cognition Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence

About this book

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 strictures 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 rigourous than purely behavioristic investigations, studies of animal intelligence spanned such wide-ranging topics as perception, spatial learning and memory, timing and numerical competence, categorisation and conceptualisation, 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.

Please note: not to be confused with the 2015 book by Olmstead & Kuhlmeier by the same title.

Contents

1. Perception and Illusion
2. Attention and Search
3. Memory Processes
4. Spatial Cognition
5. Timing and Counting
6. Conceptualization and Categorization
7. Pattern Learning
8. Tool Fabrication and Use
9. Problem Solving and Behavioral Flexibility
10. Social Cognition Processes

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Biography

Edward A. Wasserman earned his B.A. at UCLA and his Ph.D. at Indiana University. He is now Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Iowa.

Thomas R. Zentall earned his B.S. degree in psychology, his B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from Union College in 1963, and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. After an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, he joined the faculty at the University of Kentucky, where he is now Professor of Psychology.