15 - Animal cognition

Summary

Writings about animal minds date from at least the time of Aristotle, but like so much else in the biological sciences, the modern study of animal cognition began with Darwin. Traditionally, a guiding principle here is Morgan's canon, after C. Lloyd Morgan, an early ethologist and Darwinian who is best known for stating a principle commonly taken as forbidding unsupported anthropomorphism. The point of view of most researchers studying animal cognition is that how animals process information can, and should, be analyzed without making any assumptions about what their subjective experiences are like. This chapter deals with contrasting aspects of memory: cross-species comparisons of spatial memory and its relation to ecology and brain evolution on the one hand, and investigation of conscious aspects of memory in animals on the other. It sketches research on two problems in which comparative and developmental psychology are intertwined: numerical cognition and theory of mind.