The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 504 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press June 15, 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0262523221
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262523226
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

Product Review
"The Cognitive Animal is the most complete and up-to-date collection of available information on the study of animal cognitive abilities. The articles, covering numerous species and areas of research, are written in a way that makes the information accessible to readers who are not specialists in the cognitive sciences. This book also makes clear that a great deal more research requirements to be done in this field, and it presents a challenging future agenda. The more we understand about the cognitive skills of the amazing animals with whom we share our planet, the greater will be our respect for them."
--Jane Goodall, author of Reason for Hope and The Chimpanzees of Gombe

Product Description
The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals discussed include antelopes, bees, dogs, dolphins, earthworms, fish, hyenas, parrots, prairie dogs, rats, ravens, sea lions, snakes, spiders, and squirrels.

The topics include (but are not limited to) definitions of cognition, the role of anecdotes in the study of animal cognition, anthropomorphism, attention, perception, learning, memory, thinking, consciousness, intentionality, communication, planning, play, aggression, dominance, predation, recognition, assessment of self and others, social knowledge, empathy, conflict resolution, reproduction, parent-young interactions and caregiving, ecology, evolution, kin selection, and neuroethology.

Reader Reviews
This book is a large collection of short papers, somewhat comparable in style to what you would get in a peer-reviewed journal. I found many of them dull, but a few were good enough to make the book worth buying. Slobodchikoff's paper on prairie dog speech is what attracted me to the book; it's interesting but doesn't say enough to provide a convincing answer to my questions about how sophisticated their grammar is. Several of the papers provide nice anecdotes of sophisticated behavior where I didn't expect it (e.g. apparently detailed planning by a spider), but I sometimes wonder to what extent there's a selection bias that causes complex behavior to be overemphasized in reports of this nature, since they're more interesting to read than reports of animals failing to exhibit smart behavior.