Wasserman 2009 ComparativeCognition

Comparative Cognition
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of

Animal Intelligence
Wasserman and Thomas R Zentall
Print publication date: 2009

Print ISBN-13: 9780195377804
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377804.001.0001
A Natural Science Approach to the Study of Animal Intelligence
Edward A. Wasserman
Thomas R. Zentall
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377804.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

Natural science has succeeded in supplanting superstition and religion as explanations for
countless worldly eventsfrom eclipses and the tides to infectious diseases and the
circulation of the blood. What, then, is the relevance of mentalism to the present volume,
which is concerned with the intelligence of nonhuman animals? Quite simply, mentalistic
accounts of animal behavior and cognition were proposed early in the history of
comparative psychology by none other than Charles Darwin. This book places cognitive
ethology into logical and methodological perspective and lobbies on behalf of what may be
a preferable alternative to the mentalistic movement in behavioral science. The other
scientific school, termed comparative cognition, counts among its growing members most
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of the contributors to the current volume. This introductory chapter discusses a series
of central issues in the study of cognition that separate these two prominent approaches
to the comparative study of human and animal intelligence.
Keywords: Charles Darwin, natural science, comparative cognition, mentalism, cognitive ethology, animal
intelligence, nonhuman animals, behavioral science, animal behavior
1A. At first, the allure is weak; there is a vague yearning and a mild agitation.
Ultimately, the strength of the desire grows irresistible; its head turns sharply
and it skitters across the uneven floor to caress the object of its affection with
consummate rapture.
1B. A coin is drawn toward a magnet.
2A. A grim sense of foreboding wells up in the prey as the jaws of the predator
draw near. Then, jagged teeth tear deeply into the succulent tissues of the
defenseless prey. Excruciating pain sears through its flesh until the predator's
canines pierce the prey's heart.
2B. A boy eats an artichoke.
3A. The slight chill gradually becomes a wintry frost. Decisive action is initiated
with the clear goal of returning the ambient temperature to a balmy radiance.
3B. A thermostat activates a furnace.
Scientific descriptions and explanations of natural happenings are supposed to be
objective, materialistic, and mechanistic, as is the case for some of the above accounts
(labeled B) of three everyday events. In other of the above overdramatized accounts
(labeled A) of the same events, the proffered mentalistic interpretations appear to be
gratuitous, if not downright preposterous, given our current understanding of metals,
vegetables, and machines.
Mentalistic explanations of behavior and cognition in human and nonhuman animals may
be equally needless; after careful experimental scrutiny, these mentalistic accounts too
may seem ridiculous. Natural science has, indeed, succeeded in supplanting superstition
and religion as explanations for countless other worldly eventsfrom eclipses and the
tides to infectious diseases and the circulation of the blood.
What, then, is the relevance of mentalism to the present volume that is concerned with
the intelligence of nonhuman animals? Quite simply, mentalistic accounts of animal
behavior and cognition were proposed early in the history of comparative psychology by
none other than Charles Darwin (1871/1920). After the rise of behaviorism, mentalism fell
out of favor.
Surprisingly, mentalistic accounts have assumed contemporary significance due to the
writings of the late D. R. Griffin, founder of the school of inquiry called cognitive ethology,
whose prime aim is to analyze the possible conscious thoughts and experiences of
nonhuman animals (see Griffin, 1976, for the first announcement of the field; see Mason,
1976, for the first critical appraisal of the field; see Griffin, 1992, for a more recent
statement of the agenda of cognitive ethology and a review of the behavioral evidence
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that workers in the field adduce in support of this approach; and see Yoerg, 1992, and
Yoerg & Kamil, 1991, for comprehensive critiques of the writings of cognitive
ethologists). At least one of its most ardent supporters considers the main
accomplishment of cognitive (p.4) ethology to be that the very ideas of animal thinking
and consciousness have gone from being heretical to respectable (Jolly, 1991).
Putting aside the matter of respectability, we wish to take the present opportunity to
place cognitive ethology into logical and methodological perspective as well as to lobby on
behalf of what we and others believe may be a preferable alternative to this mentalistic
movement in behavioral science. The other scientific schoolwhat current workers call
comparative cognitioncounts among its growing members most of the contributors to
the current volume.
Our introductory chapter therefore discusses a series of central issues in the study of
cognition that separate these two prominent approaches to the comparative study of
human and animal cognition. After reviewing this chapter, the reader should be better
able to appreciate the nature of these approaches and the notable disparities between
them (also see Wasserman, 1993, 1997). This deeper appreciation should further help
readers to understand the methodological and theoretical positions espoused by the
authors of the collected chapters.
Central Issues in the Comparative Study of Cognition

Definitional and Observational Concerns
Few things set the animal world so dramatically apart from the rest of nature as does
cognitionan animal's ability to remember the past, to choose in the present, and to plan
for the future. To the best of our knowledge, the human and nonhuman animals on our
planet are the only living beings that evidence cognition. (The continually controversial
case of cognition and the inanimate digital computer will not concern us here; see
Blakemore & Greenfield, 1987, for a discussion of this issue.)
Despite the remarkable capacity, intricacy, and flexibility of adaptive behavior, cognition is
not a magical or supernatural power; it is the natural product of the biological activity of
the brain (see the chapters by Delius & Delius [chapter 28] and Watanabe [chapter 31],
this volume). Elucidating the workings of the brain is undoubtedly one of the most
daunting challenges ever undertaken by the human species. The current excitement that
is being generated by discoveries in the field of neuroscience testifies to the importance
of this matter.
Unlike the operation of other bodily systems (like respiration), whose activity is usually
directly observed in the isolated responses of particular organs (like the lungs), cognition
is usually indirectly evidenced through the diverse responses of many different effectors,
generally the skeletal muscles (although emerging methods in neuroscience herald the
advent of more direct measures of brain activity). Hence, a youngster may sing, hum, or
whistle a tune; play it on a piano, xylophone, or trumpet; tap out its rhythm with a stick on
a drum; or write out its score with a pen on a sheet of paper. All of these various
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behaviors divulge her musical knowledge (for more on the substitutability of different
behaviors to achieve a common end, see Rachlin, 1992, and Tolman, 1932). Therefore,
although the core of cognition lies in the activity of the brain, we usually learn of cognition
via what the early comparative psychologist Romanes (1883/1977) dubbed behavioral
ambassadors (Wasserman, 1984).
Unequivocal distinctions between cognition and simpler Pavlovian and instrumental
learning processes, as well as other behavioral or physiological processes like reflex
action, maturation, fatigue, and motivation, are devilishly difficult to devise. There is often
spirited disagreement among researchers on the merits of these distinctions, as when
workers try to explain the occurrence and integration of elaborate behavior patterns like
courtship rituals.
Many cognitive processes may be behaviorally indistinguishable from simpler learning
processes. For example, one may learn and remember a telephone number, say 987
2468, by repeatedly saying the number aloud (i.e., learning by rote), considered by many
theorists to represent a simple learning process. Alternatively, one may notice that the
telephone number contains digit patterns like the descending serial order 9-8-7 and the
even-number sequence 2468, a cognitive process. Unless clear evidence is provided
that a more complex cognitive process has been used, C. Lloyd Morgan's famous canon
of parsimony obliges us to assume that it has not; we must then conclude that a simpler
learning process can account for the learning.
The challenge then is to identify flexible behavior that cannot be accounted for by simpler
learning mechanisms. Thus, a cognitive process is one that (p.5) does not merely result
from the repetition of a behavior or from the repeated pairing of a stimulus with
reinforcement. Cognitive processes often involve emergent (untrained) relations.
Furthermore, because simple learning is assumed to generalize to physically similar
stimuli or contexts, in order to qualify as a cognitive process, the emergent relations
cannot involve stimuli or relations that are physically similar to those that were explicitly
trained.
For example, if one wanted to show that a pigeon had the concept of identity, then one
might train a pigeon to match red and green hues (i.e., to select red rather than green
when the initial stimulus is red, but to select green rather than red when the initial
stimulus is green). If one later tested the pigeon with orange and teal stimuli and one
found good transfer, then one could not assume that the concept of identity had been
demonstrated because orange is similar to red and teal is similar to green. On the other
hand, if one tested the pigeons with stimuli that were not differentially similar to the
training stimuli (e.g., black-and-white shapes such as circle and square), then evidence of
good transfer might suggest that an untrained relation had emerged (i.e., that the
concept of identity had been demonstrated; see Cook & Wasserman, chapter 16, this
volume). Thus, the demonstration of cognitive behavior implies that simpler learning
processes cannot account for the demonstrated actions.
Studying the Generality of Cognition
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Humans are far from unique in exhibiting cognition. Comparable investigative methods
have disclosed that nonhuman animals also exhibit complex and flexible behaviors that
most observers would confidently conclude disclose cognition, if members of our own
species had displayed the same behaviors in the same circumstances. One of Darwin's
enduring legacies is his provocative proposal of mental continuity between human and
nonhuman animals: The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as
it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind (1871/1920, p. 128).
More infamous was Darwin's penchant to infer a wide variety of cognitive and emotional
functionsincluding, love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, and reasonfrom
numerous anecdotes related by pet owners, naturalists, and zookeepers. These
anecdotists were not always impartial observers or careful recorders of either the
behavior in question or the conditions that promoted the behavior. As interesting and
suggestive as these anecdotes were to Darwin, they could not stand the stringent tests
of scientific scrutiny, for they were of dubious objectivity and reliability. The anecdotal
method simply would not do to establish a science of comparative cognition. A new and
different approach was needed to study the generality of cognition.
Comparative Cognition: A Natural Science Approach
Uncovering similarities and differences between human and animal behavior is a prime
concern of the field of comparative psychology. The subfield of comparative psychology
that is expressly concerned with cognitive processes in human and non-human behavior
is called comparative cognition.
In contrast to Darwin's naive reliance on anecdotal evidence of questionable veracity and
replicability, comparative psychologists now use investigative methods that are wholly
objective in order to study advanced behavior and cognition in nonhuman animals.
Precise control over relevant factors and systematic variation in pertinent organic and
environmental parameters encourages researchers in the field to adhere closely to the
experimental method.
As most students of behavior are aware, I. P. Pavlov, in Russia, and E. L. Thorndike, in
the United States, devised highly reliable and objective techniques for studying learning
in nonhuman animals. Much of the progress in the experimental study of comparative
cognition has been due to the creative application or modification of their two basic
methods.
In addition, respect for Morgan's canon of parsimony tempers the tendency for workers
in the field of comparative cognition to invoke overly elaborate interpretations of the
behavioral evidence, as Darwin and his early followers were prone to do. As Yoerg and
Kamil (1991) echoed a century after Morgan advanced his canon, we should be
circumspect in our evaluation of the level or complexity of explanation the evidence
demands (p. 277).
(p.6) Experimental Locale
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Rare or remarkable natural behaviors by animals often provide the impetus for careful
experimental investigations in laboratory settings (for compelling examples of this strategy
in the study of food storage and recovery by birds, see Balda & Kamil, 1989, and De
Kort, Tebbich, Dally, Emery, & Clayton, chapter 30, this volume). Movement from the
field to the laboratory is often necessary if the biological mechanisms controlling the
behavior are to be properly pinpointed and if rival interpretations of the behavior are to
be systematically explored and convincingly eliminated (Kacelnik, Chappell, Kenward, &
Weir, chapter 26, this volume; Yoerg & Kamil, 1991). Appropriately designed field
experiments are also a most enlightening brand of investigation (see Cheng, chapter 10,
this volume).
At other times, the scientific objective is to discover whether some human cognitive feat
can be exhibited by nonhuman animals (this approach is exemplified by the studies of
conceptual behavior by pigeons that have been reviewed and analyzed by Wasserman &
Astley, 1994, as well as by the research on directed forgetting in nonhumans that has
been reviewed by Roper & Zentall, 1993). Such demonstrations not only speak to the
species generality of the cognitive process in question but also provide essential empirical
information for understanding the possible evolutionary origins of cognition. Most
workers have found the laboratory to be a particularly suitable venue for probing the
cognitive limits of nonhuman behavior, due to the ease of varying situational variables and
recording behavioral responses.
Zentall (1993), in particular, has examined the longstanding interest in exploring the limits
of animal intelligence and the problems posed by naturalistic study alone. He concluded
that it is not unreasonable to expect that evidence of cognitive behavior will be found in
an unnatural laboratory setting, despite the fact that animals may exhibit little sign of
cognitive behavior when they are observed in their natural environment. Zentall
suggested that laboratory experimentation is especially useful because it may be the only
way to elicit latent cognitive strategies whose use results in higher levels of, or more
efficient, behavior. It may be necessary to expose an animal to artificial procedures both
to rule out explanations of behavior in terms of simple learning principles and to induce
the animal to deploy advanced cognitive abilities.
Hence, the laboratory studies of animal behavior that are conducted by comparative
psychologists are not substitutes for, but complements to, the careful naturalistic
observations of field biologists and ecologists. What we learn in one setting must inform
our understanding of what we observe in the other (Riley, Brown, & Yoerg, 1986).
Cognition and Unobservables
Because cognition is not itself directly observable, the field of comparative cognition must
(with great reluctance, it should be noted) refer to unobservables in the description and
explanation of behavior (more about this issue can be found in Honig, 1978; Mackenzie,
1977; Riley et al., 1986, Wasserman, 1981, 1982, 1983; and Zuriff, 1985). Many of the
unobservables that are used in the field of comparative cognition are of the same
functional sort as those that are commonly invoked by chemists and physicists (also see
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Pribram, 1978).
For example, the term memory describes those cases when an organism's present
behavior is a function of a past stimulus: an animal is thus said to remember a light if it
responds differently to the light on its first and second occasions (see the chapters by
Roberts [chapter 8] and Wright [chapter 9], this volume). In a parallel way, a capacitor
can be said to have stored charge when the same current applied to it on a second
occasion leads to a smaller increase in electrical potential than occurred on a first
occasion, thereby yielding a lawful functional relation between applied current and stored
charge. Similar functional considerations guide the deployment of the cognitive construct
of attention (see Blough [chapter 5] and Washburn & Taglialatela [chapter 7], this
volume).
Although interpretive dangers attend the study of cognition in nonhuman animals, there
are safeguards to those dangers. One of the founders of modern research on
comparative cognition, W. K. Honig, assessed the merits of this approach in the following
way: The analysis is plausible because it places cognitive process and cognitive behavior
within the framework of a functional and experimental analysis of behavior. There is
nothing magical or mysterious about the relevant experimental or criterion behaviors,
and thus processes (p.7) remain within the realm of behavioral identification and
analysis. We do not need a new kind of psychology to deal with cognitive events (1978, p.
11).
Other unobservables are of a distinctly different, mentalistic nature and are scrupulously
avoided by natural scientistswhether they are psychologists or physicists. These
mentalistic notions spring from our own private experience and they are further shaped
by an enculturation process that is strongly rooted in Cartesian dualism and folk
psychology (Michel, 1991, offers an incisive analysis of the fruitlessness of folk
psychological theory as it has been applied to both human and nonhuman animals). Such
mentalistic ideas are well represented by three of the accounts that began this
introduction.
Sometimes, however, aspects of ideas that began as vague mentalistic thoughts based on
subjective experience can be operationalized and empirically studiedat least within a
limited framework. An example is the study of theory of mind.
If you have a theory of mind, then you should be capable of understanding what others
may or may not know. This notion does not require that you have the ability to read the
mind of another person, just that you understand that for someone to know something,
some experience with it is required.
When studied in children, theory of mind may take the form of the following scenario: two
children, Sally and Billy, are shown the contents of two covered boxes: one is empty,
whereas the other contains a small toy. Sally is then asked to leave the room and the
experimenter moves the toy to the other box. The experimenter then asks Billy, When
Sally comes back into the room and I ask her, Where is the toy?, what will she say?
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When tested in this way, young children, who presumably do not have theory of mind,
indicate the veridical (changed) location of the toy. Older children, however, understand
that Sally did not see the toy being moved and therefore Sally should believe that the toy
is where it was originally. Older children can therefore infer what Sally knows and does
not know. In this case, language provides an important tool for the study of cognitive
behavior in humans, but carefully designed experiments may allow researchers similar
access to cognitive processes, analogous to theory of mind, in nonverbal animals (see
Premack & Woodruff, 1978, and Vonk & Povinelli, chapter 19, this volume).
Cognition and Mentalism
Especially when mentalistic notions are applied to other living beings, they suggest the
analogous experience of some private thought or feeling (for an early discussion of
mentalistic inference via this anthropomorphic analogy, see Romanes, 1883/1977; for a
more recent discussion of anthropomorphism in behavioral science, see Kennedy, 1992).
For instance, a rat that is placed into a cold environment will learn to press a lever that
briefly activates a heat lamp. Some individuals might say that the rat does so because it
feels cold, because it wants warmth, and because it knows that pressing the lever
will produce heat. But, it is crucial to realize that any feeling, wanting, and knowing
are not necessarily in the rat but may reside in the person projecting onto the rat his or
her own private experiences. Nothing in the rat's behavior demands that we use these
mentalistic terms, a point that can forcefully be made by considering the similar behavior
of a thermostat: a human-made device that we staunchly believe is quite unable to think
or to feel as we do.
Of course, the use of mentalistic terms is common in everyday speech and in some
circles of scientific and philosophical discourse. Its ubiquity suggests that this explanatory
style may be innate (Humphrey, 1978). But, it may be learned; children are frequently
instructed by their elders that the cat wants to have its head rubbed, that mom's car
didn't feel like starting today, or that nature abhors a vacuum. Whatever its
provenance (for further conjectures on the origins of mentalism, see Kennedy, 1992, and
Povinelli, 1993), many individuals believe that mentalism is not a sound basis for a natural
science of cognitionwhether of humans or of other animals. These theorists consider
that mentalism is a prescientific mode of explanation that may hamper progress in the
behavioral and brain sciences (for more on this view, see Kennedy, 1992; Skinner, 1977,
1985; and Hulse, Postscript, this volume).
These points notwithstanding, mentalism is not a theoretical affliction that affects only the
softheaded among us. No less than the Nobel Laureate physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov once
adopted a mentalistic approach to understanding the conditioned reflexes that he and his
co-workers discovered in their studies of canine digestion.
The beginning of that story is familiar enough: Pavlov and his Russian colleagues
serendipitously (p.8) observed that hungry dogs salivated not only to food in the mouth
but also to stimuli that were repeatedly paired with food, like the familiar sight of the
experimenter entering the room holding a bowl of food. The end of the story is also well
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known: Pavlov vigorously insisted that natural scientific laws of association formation
could be experimentally established that linkedvia the dog's neural machinery
temporally contiguous stimuli, like the sight of the food bowl with food in the mouth.
What is missing from most textbooks is an account of the extraordinary difficulty that
Pavlov and his collaborators had in deciding just how to go about investigating and
interpreting their groundbreaking observations. In the 1928 book chronicling his first 25
years of conditioning research, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, Pavlov describes
this fascinating story as involving two opposite paths to comprehending conditioned
reflexes: the mentalistic approach and the scientific approach.
According to the mentalistic approach, we should be mainly interested in the internal or
subjective world of the dog rather than in its overt actions. This approach assumes that
the internal world of the dogits thoughts, its feelings, and its desires (if it has any)is
analogous to our own. Pavlov and his colleagues actually entertained this approach prior
to 1903 in order to understand the then-called psychical secretions of their dogs to
signals for food.
Using the mentalistic approach, the researchers tried to explain their findings by
fancying the subjective condition of their dogs. Unfortunately, all that came from these
many musings were endless controversies and unverifiable personal opinions. This
interpretive breakdown forced the researchers to abandon what Pavlov suspected was
an inborn inclination for people to adopt a mentalistic interpretation and to promote a less
familiar, but more productive objective approach. This analytical transition from
mentalistic interpretation to a natural science approach was not an easy one to make;
indeed, Pavlov described the process as involving persistent deliberation and
considerable interpersonal dispute.
From a different perspective, other authors have argued on behalf of mentalism as a
bountiful source of fresh hypotheses for proper scientific scrutiny. Famous among those
authors was Tolman (1938), who wrote, I, in my future work intend to go ahead
imagining how, if I were a rat, I would behave (p. 24; further discussion of this proposal
can be found in Burghardt, 1985, and Kennedy, 1992). As long as mentalistic musings are
used purely heuristically, like the fanciful flights that are said to have inspired August
Kekule's hypothesization of the benzene ring, they may be beneficial; they are, in this
case, unproblematic. The problem is that too many workers pursue mentalism to its more
troublesome extremes.
Mentalism and Cognitive Ethology
Several cognitive ethologists have contended that our private experience is so profound
and salient that to exclude it from a scientific analysis is to leave out a necessary
ingredient to a complete understanding of cognition and behavior (see Feigl, 1967, p.
138, for a recounting of Einstein's colorful comments on the matter). Cognitive ethologists
have further claimed that, although we presently lack the critical methodological tools for
directly assaying consciousness in other organisms, these techniques may be on the
immediate horizon. We must, they implore, not close our minds to the possible
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development of such windows into others' minds (Ristau, 1991).
Personal experience is indeed basic and striking; it was utterly undeniable to Ren
Descartes (1641/1988). Yet, experience is inherently private. As Lubinski and Thompson
(1993) have observed, experiential phenomena are directly accessible via one road, a
road on which only one person travels (p. 668) (also see Baum, 1993). Because of the
impossibility of independent observers ever agreeing on the experiential facts at issue,
many theorists have suggested that private experience simply falls outside of the ken of
natural sciencea positively public business. The development of objective windows
into others' minds is thus better considered to be the stuff of science fiction than of
science fact. It is extraordinarily unlikely that any behavioral, introspective, or
physiological methods will ever allow us to experience the thoughts and feelings of
another organismhuman or nonhuman.
Critically, cognitive ethologists' fascination with interspecific communication (see Kuczaj &
Walker, chapter 29, this volume) as such an objective window is probably not the royal
road to shared private experience: Asking another [organism] what (p.9) it is thinking
may give you another piece of behavior, but it will never give you direct access to its
mental state (Laasko, 1993). Let us not forget Wittgenstein's famous (1953) aphorism,
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Appeal to the eventual development of
objective mental windows appears to be, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, an
obstacle to real progress in the scientific analysis of complex behavior and cognition. If
the history of other sciences can be a guide, the study of animal behavior will progress
only to the extent that we can devise techniques and metaphors that avoid imputation of
human mental phenomena to animals which result from metaphoric extensions of our folk
psychology (Michel, 1991, p. 268). To many past and present workers in the field of
comparative cognition, what is generally called operational behaviorism (Zuriff, 1985)
provides those progressive techniques and metaphors.
Simply put, the notion of windows into others' minds appears to be misguided.
Behaviorsbe they simple or complex, be they verbal or nonverbal, be they those of
human or nonhuman animalsare purely the product of biological mechanisms. When we
infer private experiences in others from their public behaviors, we are not using a
metaphorical window at all, but rather a mirror. We see ourselves in the behavior of
others. Even more perilously, we see our inner selves reflected in the outward behavior
of others. It is, of course, reassuring to see ourselves when we look into a mirror; to see
someone or something else would be most discombobulating. We may thus be comforted
that other animals seem pretty much like us when we describe and interpret their
behavior in terms of our own private experience.
Our tendency to infer mental states in animals may be an extension of our ability to
project onto other humans our own mental states. We infer what their mental state would
be if we were to behave similarly under similar circumstances. Such inferences may have
practical value in our social relations with other humans. For example, we express our
sorrow to a friend who has lost a parent or who has been involved in an accident. But, we
Page 10 of 15
should not confuse any possible social function of assuming similar mental states between
ourselves and others (sympathy or empathy) with an objective understanding of those
states. When we express sympathy, it does not much matter if we are wrong; our
expression of concern alone is appreciated because others are grateful for our thoughts.
In those cases, the assumption of a common mental or emotional state may play a social
role, but that state itself is not the subject of science. When we make assumptions about
the similarity of our own mental states to those of other animals, this vision may be so
distorted by the lens of mentalism that a clear view of the animal mind can never be
gainedand that is our true quest.
Finally, we might well ask what cognitive ethologists hope to gain by postulating the
existence of conscious experience in animals other than a possibly false sense of
completeness in treating both the inner and outer aspects of behavior (see Romanes,
1883/1977, for more on this distinction). Griffin's answer is that, if animals do indeed have
mental experience, then that experience may affect the animals' behavior, welfare, and
biological fitness (1978, p. 528). However, understanding any possible functional
significance of mental experience must surely await the collection of convincing empirical
evidence of that experience and the delineation of the mechanisms of its proximate
causation. Many critics fear that this wait will be endless.
Might it not be better to pursue a purely objective analysis of behavior and cognition,
one that judiciously avoids such treacherous concepts as mind and consciousness and
that follows the proven path of natural science? This course of action was precisely what
the early behaviorist H. S. Jennings proposed when he observed that apart from their
relation to the problem of consciousnessthe objective processes in behavior are of the
highest interest in themselves. [W]e need a knowledge of the laws controlling them, of
the same sort as our knowledge of the laws of metabolism (1904/1976, p. v).
The Agenda of Comparative Cognition

The myriad behaviors of humans and other animals persuade us that they remember the
past, they choose in the present, and they plan for the future. On what behavioral,
situational, and historical grounds do we make these cognitive inferences? What are the
behavioral and biological mechanisms of remembering, choosing, and planning? Are
humans special among all other animals in their processes of cognition? What, if anything,
(p.10) does language add to an animal's ability to adapt to changing conditions of
survival? These are some of the truly crucial, exciting, and answerable questions for a
science of comparative cognition; these and other intriguing issues are carefully
considered in the 34 chapters that follow.
The experimental study of animal intelligence should greatly advance our understanding
of behavioral adaptation and its evolution in the animal kingdom. Perhaps we should
simply get on with this task and leave mentalistic speculations to philosophers, whose
theories of mind and conjectures about consciousness need not be bound by the
constraints of natural science. We do need a science of comparative cognition. But, that
field should not be loosely slung in a net of mentalistic verbiage. Rather, it should be
defined as the rigorous, wholly scientific study of cognition in an ethological and ecological
Page 11 of 15
context (Yoerg & Kamil, 1991, p. 278).
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Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of

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Central Issues in the Comparative Study of Cognition

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