Animal cognition and animal behaviour

Abstract

Cognitive processes such as perception, learning, memory and decision making play an important role in mate choice, foraging and many other behaviours. In this review, I summarize a few key ideas about animal cognition developed in a recent book (Shettleworth 1998, Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour) and briefly review some areas in which interdisciplinary research on animal cognition is currently proving especially productive. Cognition, broadly defined, includes all ways in which animals take in information through the senses, process, retain and decide to act on it. Studying animal cognition does not entail any particular position on whether or to what degree animals are conscious. Neither does it entail rejecting behaviourism in that one of the greatest challenges in studing animal cognition is to formulate clear behavioural criteria for inferring specific mental processes. Tests of whether or not apparently goal-directed behaviour is controlled by a representation of its goal, episodic-like memory in birds, and deceptive behaviour in monkeys provide examples. Functional modelling has been integrated with analyses of cognitive mechanisms in a number of areas, including studies of communication, models of how predator learning and attention affect the evolution of conspicuous and cryptic prey, tests of the relationship betweeen ecological demands on spatial cognition and brain evolution, and in research on social learning. Rather than a ‘new field’ of cognitive ecology, such interdisciplinary research on animal cognition exemplifies a revival of interest in proximate mechanisms of behaviour.