Animal cognition
[16] The work of Thorndike, Pavlov and a little later of the outspoken behaviorist John B. Watson[17] set the direction of much research on animal behavior for more than half a century.
This view seeks to explain behavior, including "private events" like mental images, solely by reference to the environmental contingencies impinging on the human or animal.
[25] Animals came to be seen as "goal seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity".
[26] The acceleration of research on animal cognition in the last 50 years or so has led to a rapid expansion in the variety of species studied and methods employed.
In the laboratory, animals push levers, pull strings, dig for food, swim in water mazes, or respond to images on computer screens to get information for discrimination, attention, memory, and categorization experiments.
[27] Careful field studies explore memory for food caches, navigation by stars,[28] communication, tool use, identification of conspecifics, and many other matters.
Some researchers have made effective use of a Piagetian methodology, taking tasks which human children are known to master at different stages of development and investigating which of them can be performed by particular species.
[29] From a methodological point of view, one of the main risks in this sort of work is anthropomorphism, the tendency to interpret an animal's behavior in terms of human feelings, thoughts, and motivations.
This "attentional priming" is commonly said to result from a pretrial activation of a mental representation of the attended object, which Tinbergen called a "searching image".
Seemingly much more difficult is an animal's ability to categorize natural objects that vary a great deal in color and form even while belonging to the same group.
Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.
Several species of birds have been observed to use tools in the wild, including warblers, parrots, Egyptian vultures, brown-headed nuthatches, gulls and owls.
He'd also learned what "same" and "different" mean—a step crucial in human intellectual development[89] Several species of wrasses have been observed using rocks as anvils to crack bivalve (scallops, urchins and clams) shells.
The fish fans sand to unearth the bivalve, takes it into its mouth, swims several meters to a rock, which it then uses as an anvil by smashing the mollusc apart with sideward thrashes of the head.
[94] Cephalopod cognitive evolution is hypothesized to have been shaped primarily by predatory and foraging pressures, but a challenging mating context may also have played a role.
[93] Ants of the species Conomyrma bicolor pick up stones and other small objects with their mandibles and drop them down the vertical entrances of rival colonies, allowing workers to forage for food without competition.
[95] It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving problems that appear to require abstract reasoning;[96] Wolfgang Köhler's (1917) work with chimpanzees is a famous early example.
[100] A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other individuals or situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.
The same individual is trained to anticipate that stimulus B, e.g. a 900 Hz tone, precedes a negative event, e.g. bland food is delivered when the animal presses a lever.
[102] The authors suggested that they had demonstrated "...for the first time a link between the directly measured positive affective state and decision making under uncertainty in an animal model".
There is some evidence for cognitive bias in a number of species, including rats, dogs, rhesus macaques, sheep, chicks, starlings and honeybees.
In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behavior to some non-primate species, including parrots and great spotted woodpeckers.
[114][115] This has been demonstrated using carefully crafted experiments based on measuring the time it takes for a scouting ant to pass the information to its team about the branch of an experimental maze on which food can be found.
[151] The great apes, dolphins, and rhesus monkeys have demonstrated the ability to monitor their own mental states and use an "I don't know" response to avoid answering difficult questions.
Morgan, however, carefully observed the dog's prior, random, purposeless actions and argued that they involved "continued trial and failure, until a happy effect is reached", rather than "methodical planning".
The chimpanzee, Köhler observed, "has special difficulty in solving such problems; he often draws into a situation the strangest and most distant tools, and adopts the most peculiar methods, rather than remove a simple obstacle which could be displaced with perfect ease".
Moty Nissani[164] of Wayne State University trained Burmese logging elephants to lift a lid in order to retrieve food from a bucket.
A traditionally common image is the scala naturae, the ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top.
This has contributed to a common perception amongst researchers that mammals and birds share similar "advanced" cognitive characteristics as humans, while other vertebrates such as teleost fishes are more "primitive", which has led to them being understudied.
Despite this, increasing evidence indicates that fish possess not just capabilities that cannot be explained through Pavlovian and operant conditioning alone, such as reversal learning, novel obstacle avoidance, and passing simultaneous two-choice tasks, but also even more complex capabilities such as navigational cognitive mapping,[176][177][178] inhibitory motor control,[179] and empathy enabled by oxytocin to sense fear in other fish.
