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This chapter compares cognitive and associative accounts of behaviour by animals on transitive inference tasks. It explains that transitive relationships are often important to animals and that transitive inference would permit an animal to behave in a way appropriate to the dominance relation between other animals even if their relationship has not been directly ascertained. It illustrates a more general methodological dispute between ethological and experimental approaches to animal cognition.

The social milieus of animals can be complex, ranging from almost completely asocial to monogamous pairs (no mean feat) to entire societies. To adapt to a constantly shifting environment of individuals striving toward their own goals, animals appear to have evolved specialized cognitive abilities. As appealing and intuitive as the idea of social cognition is, just defining it is difficult. We attempted to delineate social cognition, speculate on its adaptive value, and come to an understanding of what we mean when we talk about complexity. Transitive inference is presented as an example of a cognitive ability that is important for social animals, as is theory of mind. There are a number of challenges and debates in trying to determine what cognitive abilities different animals use to solve their social problems. This chapter discusses methodological approaches and issues needed to propel the future of research into social knowledge.

This chapter discusses the results of experiments that investigated animal cognition in an integrative fashion by combining the methodology and insights of experimental psychology and evolutionary biology. This combination can be extraordinarily fruitful, yielding novel perspectives that can be applied broadly to the study of animal learning and memory. The chapter focuses on selective attention, priming, and foraging behavior in animals, along with spatial cognition and transitive inference. Considerations of how foraging animals might use selective attention while searching for cryptic prey have resulted in interesting questions that focus on the mechanisms of selective attention. Two naturally occurring foraging patterns, hunting by expectation and searching image, are related to two phenomena studied under laboratory conditions, associative priming and sequential priming.