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This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to bring together a diverse group of experts in comparative psychology, neurobiology, and the evolution of animal vision to provide a snapshot of the current state of knowledge in these fields. An overview of the subsequent chapters is then presented.

Dogs have always been the focus of human interest about nature. In many cultures they even won the ‘prestigious’ title of being man's best friend, whilst in others dogs did not receive such sympathy from humans. This chapter reviews the history of dogs in science and puts the study of dogs into an ethological perspective that is interested in questions on function and evolution of behaviour in parallel with understanding behavioural mechanism and development. Comparative investigations lie at the heart of the study of dogs, and the chapter provides an overview on theoretical problems associated with the comparative method.

The cognitive revolution in psychology was founded on the premise that all cognitive processes result from rule-governed operations and that cognizers do not need to understand these rules to act “rationally” or “intelligently.” Despite its intent to replace romantic folk psychological intuitions about how the mind works, anthropomorphism is prevalent throughout much of comparative psychology: claims that animals perform “human-like” feats find broad acceptance in the media and permeate the academic debate, while less anthropomorphic explanations are largely dismissed. To construct a viable scientific theory of nonhuman minds, comparative psychology must aim for a computationally explicit account of cognition—not just folk psychological descriptions. Given the impressive body of data that has been collected on the social cognitive abilities of scrub jays, compiling a functional specification of corvid social cognition would be a great place to start.

This chapter reviews research that has pursued the comparative psychology of visual object perception by investigating the applicability to pigeons of Biederman's theory of object recognition: recognition-by-components. Pigeons show strong control of the individual components of multipart objects, they are highly sensitive to the spatial organization of an object's several parts, they show some degree of rotational invariance while simultaneously attending to view-specific features of shape stimuli, and they not only learn about shape, but also encode information about such surface properties as color, brightness, and shading.

It is easy to embrace the idea that humans are very different from even their closest living relatives. In the abstract, this tension between similarity and difference does not present a real barrier to thinking about cognition from an evolutionary perspective. After all, that is what evolution is all about: similarity and difference. The general practice of comparative psychology has, however, largely been a deflationary one, attempting to explain away differences between species as unimportant, trivial, or simply a function of methodological artifacts. This chapter explores the possibility that whereas many species form concepts about observable things and use those concepts in flexible and productive ways, humans alone think about such things as God, ghosts, gravity, and other minds. It examines whether the underlying “abstractive depth” that makes reasoning about unobservables possible co-evolved with natural language. This chapter explores the unobservability hypothesis in the context of three areas of research: concept formation, theory of mind, and physical causality.

Argues that all of the behaviours that we share with non-human animals can, and should, be explained in terms of the first-order, non-phenomenal, contents of our experiences. So, although we do have phenomenally conscious experiences when we act, most of the time it is not by virtue of their being phenomenally conscious that they have their role in causing our actions. In consequence, the fact that my dispositional higher-order thought theory of phenomenal consciousness might withhold such consciousness from most non-human animals should have a minimal impact on comparative psychology. The explanations for the behaviours that we have in common with animals can remain shared also, despite the differences in phenomenally conscious status.

Chapter 2 traces George Herbert Mead's education in laboratory sciences, especially at the University of Berlin, and his exposure to controversies in psychology. He had a detailed, hands-on training in a variety of forms of scientific research in both his undergraduate and graduate work. In the latter, he was even one of a few advanced students who worked as assistants in the experimental psychology laboratory at Berlin. When he took up his first professional position at the University of Michigan, he designed unique scientific examinations that could inform his emerging theoretical perspective, including experiments on higher mental functions, preparation of neurological specimens, study of animal behavior, and examination of hypnotic suggestion. The chapter identifies how Mead's well-known social psychology bears the imprint of his earlier rigorous scientific investigation in physiological and comparative psychology. These findings demonstrate the incongruity between an understanding of knowledge production as progressing rationally and one based on meandering experiments and problems.

The chapter considers the relationship between the DA and the PN, and the Sens. in particular. Because the sense-objects are causally prior to acts of perception, Sens. can account for a variety of sensory activities by providing a fuller account of the sense-objects than those required to define the sense-faculties as such, the task of the DA. The composition of the sense-organs is also used to explain a range of features of perception (such as how we smell by breathing) which, again, do not enter into the definitions of the senses. Animals with the same senses may differ with respect to such non-defining attributes of perception. PN generally makes greater use of material explanation than the DA because the phenomena considered are not fully determined by the capacities of the soul as such.

Humans have the ability to monitor their own cognition and change their behaviour based on information gleaned from that monitoring. We think about our own thinking, and are often fully aware of our mental states. This metacognitive ability is closely linked to, and may be the basis for, human consciousness.

The comparative analysis of metacognition is a pathway towards uncovering fundamental information about the evolution of mind. A substantial amount of research has been directed towards this goal in the last 15 years. However, progress in the comparative analysis of metacognition is threatened by conflicting views about the standards required to document metacognition in animals. Consequently, the goal of this chapter is to outline some ideas about what type of evidence is required to validate an animal model of metacognition. The first part of this chapter provides a brief review of examples of metacognition. The second part of this chapter analyses these experiments with respect to two types of hypotheses: the first proposal is that the subject has the capacity of metacognition; the second proposal is that the subject is not capable of metacognition but solves the problem using basic learning mechanisms. The next section outlines some examples of conflicting views about interpretation of metacognition experiments. The chapter concludes by recommending the use of simulations from computational models of proposed psychological processes (i.e. metacognition and non-metacognition) to determine if a particular pattern of data may be explained by metacognition or alternative hypotheses. This approach may be used to increase our confidence that putative evidence of metacognition is indeed based on the capacity of metacognition.

The cognitive abilities of species outside of mammalian classes may prove useful and insightful to the study of animal intelligence. In Europe, particularly within the tradition of Gestalt psychology or in the work of zoologists somewhat influenced by the Gestalt tradition, studies of the intelligence of birds and fish (and even nonvertebrate species such as insects) have been quite common. After World War II, the Gestalt research tradition largely disappeared and the remaining followers of Gestalt psychology (concentrated in a few universities in Germany, the northeast of Italy, and Japan) concerned themselves mainly with studies of human visual perception. In this chapter, the author describes some of the work that he has carried out with his collaborators in the past 15 years on cognition in nonmammalian species (mainly the domestic chicken) and addresses issues that were largely inspired by the European Gestalt tradition, rather than by the psychology of animal learning, which has provided the typical background of most contemporary comparative psychology.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to identify, classify, and memorize pitches without an external referent. Musical AP adds the further requirement of pitch naming in the notation of Western music. This chapter considers the more general kind of AP, without the requirement of note naming. It describes several operant experiments in which two species of mammals (humans and rats), three species of songbirds (zebra finches, white-throated sparrows, and black-capped chickadees), and one species of parrot (budgerigars) discriminated and categorized individual tones or ranges of tones related with reward and non-reward. As the discriminations became more difficult, the avian species, which learn their vocalizations, maintained highly accurate AP, but the mammals slipped from lackluster to nonexistent AP. The findings illustrate Charles Darwin's hypothesis that continuity in mental abilities underlies differences among species. The science of comparative psychology owes its first claim to scientific legitimacy to Darwin.

This chapter situates the dispute over the metacognitive capacities of non-human animals in the context of wider debates about the phylogeny of metarepresentational abilities. This chapter clarifies the nature of the dispute, before contrasting two different accounts of the evolution of metarepresentation. One is first-person-based, claiming that it emerged initially for purposes of metacognitive monitoring and control. The other is social in nature, claiming that metarepresentation evolved initially to monitor the mental states of others. These accounts make differing predictions about what we should expect to find in non-human animals: the former predicts that metacognitive capacities in creatures incapable of equivalent forms of mindreading should be found, whereas the latter predicts that they should not. The chapter elaborates and defend the latter form of account, drawing especially on what is known about decision-making and metacognition in humans. In doing so the chapter shows that so-called ‘uncertainty-monitoring’ data from monkeys can just as well be explained in non-metarepresentational affective terms, as might be predicted by the social-evolutionary account.

Over the last decade, studies on metacognition have been playing an increasingly prominent role in the field of animal cognition. Although a growing number of studies have documented responses consistent with metacognition, currently there is some debate about their proper interpretation. This chapter reviews the evidence that has accumulated in the last decade in the so-called information-seeking paradigm, which involves confronting subjects with two or more containers where food can be hidden. Researchers have manipulated several variables including the visibility of the baiting, the food type, and the time since the baiting took place. To get the food, subjects have to select the baited container but before they do so, they can, if they wish, look inside the container to verify its contents. Although the initial results could be explained as a result of random search, response competition, or perceiving anxiety rather than monitoring memories, recent findings have in turn challenged each of these alternative explanations. Information seeking in the great apes can be characterized as targeted (i.e. individuals do not search randomly), integrated (i.e. individuals can incorporate multiple types of information into their decision, including information derived by inference), and facultative (i.e. subjects can increase or decrease their searches depending on the information that they possess and the cost of searching and/or choosing wrongly). These findings, together with those from other metacognition paradigms, suggest that the great apes have some access to the causes of their uncertainty, and they can flexibly deploy means to remedy this situation.

This chapter scrutinizes the rich pool of behavioural measures of metacognition used with animals for devising new procedures that do not depend on verbalizing mental states for assessing metacognition in young children and infants. To help select the optimal methods I formulated two conceptual problems besetting the metacognitive interpretation of behavioural data: (1) does the critical behaviour depend only on the animal’s cognitive ability to be in a particular mental state or does it depend on the animal’s metacognitive awareness of being in that state? (2) Does the critical behaviour really depend on recognizing being in a particular mental state (e.g. being disgusted, being uncertain) or is it dependent only on typically confounded external conditions eliciting these states (e.g. facing something disgusting, facing a difficult task)? The assessment concludes that no single task can unambiguously answer these questions. This chapter's contribution to devising behavioural tests of metacognition for children consists only in formulating my two problems and setting the bar of criteria for future investigations.

The avian food-caching paradigm has greatly contributed to our understanding of a number of cognitive capacities. Although the early work focused on spatial memory, contemporary studies of the cognitive abilities of food-caching birds have a much broader scope. This chapter describes an approach to the comparative cognition of caching which capitalizes on an integrative knowledge of behavioral ecology and comparative psychology. An understanding of behavioral ecology allows one to pose questions about the selective pressures that drive the evolution of cognitive abilities in food-caching birds and how a bird's decisions concerning both caching and cache-recovery are shaped by ecological factors. In comparative psychology, the emphasis is on understanding the general processes of learning, memory, and cognition, and the questions are often inspired by the logical structure of the task. This chapter concludes by asking why an understanding of evolution in general, and of the phylogeny of the studied species in particular, is essential for how we interpret species differences in cognition.

Humans have the ability to monitor their own cognition and change their behaviour based on information gleaned from that monitoring. We think about our own thinking, and are often fully aware of our mental states. This metacognitive ability is closely linked to, and may be the basis for, human consciousness. This chapter states that some non-human animals (hereafter, animals) may have a similar ability to monitor their own cognition, though the exact nature of this ability is unknown. The chapter reviews several perceptual, psychophysical, and memory experiments that show animals apparently perceiving and using information about their own mental states. Animal performance in these tasks shows interesting parallels to human performance. The chapter also reviews some problems with this evidence, and discuss ways that researchers have sought to overcome those problems. The chapter states that, taken as a whole, the evidence strongly indicates that some animals have metaminds — minds capable of understanding not only perceptual information, but also information about their own mental states.