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This chapter points out that scene understanding is not based from a unique, isolated cognitive process but rather from a more general mechanism of associative processing. It proposes a mechanism of scene understanding by which properties of a scene that have high associative strength are extracted first and used to access long-term representations of contexts and scene categories. These long-term representations are then used to generate predictions and expectations about the environment, facilitating information processing. Scene processing is extrapolated into the context it is associated with that has been learned over a lifetime, providing top-down feedback to guide further processing.

This chapter examines the extent to which action-mirroring phenomena can be explained in terms of very simple associative processes. It locates the associative accounts of motoric mirror phenomena among other ‘mirror theories’ and proposes an associative hypothesis called the associative sequence learning (ASL) model. It discusses the potential extension of the ASL model to cover non-motoric mirror phenomena and identifies the effects that appear to be beyond its explanatory reach.

This chapter describes the cognitive abilities of western scrub jays with their complex caching strategies. It contrasts mechanistic explanations of behaviour in terms of associative processes with intentional explanations in terms of rationally flexible interactions between beliefs and desires. It explains that associative processes may seem capable of explaining memory for food caches in scrub jays because nodes activated by visual cues around the cache site become associated with those excited by food stored at the site.

Part of the rationale for this chapter was that the exploration of animal cognition might give some insight into such questions as whether some animals might be conscious, and some not, and whether some animals might be more conscious than others. It is seen that associative processes are ubiquitous in animals, and have been unable to find evidence for a significant ‘leap’ in cognition between one animal species and another — with one exception. If there is a strong link between consciousness and cognition, this suggests a difference in consciousness between animals and humans. But whether cognition is related to consciousness is an interesting question. Is language merely a cognitive leap, or is it the Rubicon between unconsciousness and consciousness? This is the central question that this chapter attempts to explore.