Brendan O. McGonigle (18 May 1939 – 29 November 2007) was a British/Irish experimental psychologist noted for his research on the learning activities of monkeys.
[4] A well known study with Margaret Chalmers published in Nature[5] adapted a test of transitive reasoning for monkeys and showed that monkeys were capable of performing on these tasks at comparable levels of success to young children.
The authors argued that both species were evincing rational choice based on linear ordering of information and later confirmed this using reaction time measures.
[6] In his research, he was concerned to allow monkeys long-term learning opportunities comparable to that available for children, and so his subsequent work with Cebus apella was a long and staged programme in which the monkeys were trained to seriate by size and classify by shape and colour up to 12 objects on a touch screen – a level of ordering competence that only emerges in human development at around 6/7 years of age and had never before been demonstrated in a non-human species.
[7] This is the first example of the acquisition of a complex hierarchical structure by a non-human primate and has been cited by Hauser and McDermott (2003)[8] as a possible exception to the claim that only humans have "infinite productivity".