Animal cognition and animal behaviour

“Terms that have histories cannot be defined.” – Nietzsche“[T]he reality to which we were attending seemed to resist our thinking it.” – Cora Diamond[1] Much has been learned in recent decades about the behaviour and abilities of many species of non-human animals. Increasingly many who reflect on the abilities of languageless animals are uncomfortable with a once prevalent dichotomy of either assigning these abilities to the realm of mere (usually “associative”) mechanism or granting such creatures full rationality and more or less the entire range of abilities that involves. This has lead to no little reflection and debate regarding how to proceed in studying animal “cognition,” and about what counts as adequately or accurately explaining animal behaviour. I cautiously hope herein to contribute to the clarity of what is already a discussion too rich and complex to do any justice to here. Little of what I say will be original, but the particular way of approaching the issues herein may shed some light on why certain issues have endured.

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How can we study the evolution of animal minds?

10.1101/024422 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Maxime Cauchoix ◽

Alexis Chaine

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Evolutionary Ecology ◽

Animal Cognition ◽

Comparative Cognition ◽

Animal Behaviour ◽

Evolutionary Approach ◽

Cognitive Evolution ◽

Evolutionary Time ◽

Animal Minds ◽

Evolutionary Mechanisms

During the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these methods could be extended to gain new insights into cognitive evolution. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (ie: neural and developmental) and ultimate (ie: ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. Our goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientist and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behaviour. We believe that in doing so, we can break new ground in our understanding of the evolution of cognition as well as gain a much better understanding of animal behaviour.

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Let's call a memory a memory, but what kind?

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x19000360 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Nazim Keven

Keyword(s):

Episodic Memory ◽

Animal Cognition ◽

The World

Abstract Hoerl & McCormack argue that animals cannot represent past situations and subsume animals’ memory-like representations within a model of the world. I suggest calling these memory-like representations as what they are without beating around the bush. I refer to them as event memories and explain how they are different from episodic memory and how they can guide action in animal cognition.

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