Comparative Psychology Research Articles

Are there disciplinary boundaries in the comparative study of primate cognition?

A view continues to gain momentum that regards investigation of the cognition of great apes in captive settings as affording us a model for human cognitive evolution. Researchers from disciplines such as comparative psychology, anthropology, and even archaeology, seem eager to put their theories to the test by using great apes as their chosen experimental model. Questions addressed currently by comparative psychologists have long been the object of attention by neurophysiologists, psychobiologists and neuroscientists, who, however, often use rodents and monkeys as the species of choice. Whereas comparative psychology has been influenced greatly by ethology, much neuroscience has developed against a background of physiology and medicine. This separation of the intellectual contexts wherein they have arisen and flourished has impeded the development of fluid interaction between comparative psychologists and researchers in the other disciplines. We feel that it would be beneficial for comparative psychologists and neuroscientists to combine research endeavours far more often, in order to address common questions of interest related to cognition. We regard interdisciplinary cross-pollination to be particularly desirable, even if many comparative psychologists lack deep expertise about the workings of the brain, and even if many neuroscientists lack expert knowledge about the behaviour of different species. Furthermore, we believe that anthropology, archaeology, human evolutionary studies, and related disciplines, may well provide us with significant contextual knowledge about the physical and temporal background to the evolution in humans of specific cognitive skills. To that end, we urge researchers to dismantle methodological, conceptual and historical disciplinary boundaries, in order to strengthen cross-disciplinary cooperation in order to broaden and deepen our insights into the cognition of nonhuman and human primates.

Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 by Elizabeth A. Williams

Reviewed by: Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 by Elizabeth A. Williams Travis A. Weisse (bio) Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 elizabeth a. williams University of Chicago Press, 2020 434 pp. The appetite for food is such a ubiquitous, innate, and mundane feature of daily life for all creatures that one could be forgiven for expecting that scientific investigations would have mapped out its peculiarities long ago. But historian of science Elizabeth Williams shows us, through this exhaustive intellectual history of attempts to define, delimit, or investigate appetite, that many of the most elite Western thinkers across time found the concept of appetite too nebulous to answer even the most basic questions [End Page 276] about our core gastrological urge. This book condenses countless clinical observations and laboratory experiments—many only obliquely related—into a relatively simple narrative to make appetite "appear" as a historical object. Following her actors, Williams splits appetite into dozens of incommensurable conceptual slivers, and grappling with them collectively shows us, to a certain extent, why we seem to know so little about something so essential to our lived experience. Williams's book is subdivided chronologically into four major sections, each with three chapters highlighting a different scientific arc, school of thought, or pivotal debate. Though the book's subtitle suggests the material only covers the period from 1750 to 1950, the first quarter of the book explores Western ideas of appetite that predated 1750, from ancient Greece and Rome, through the scientific revolution, and into the Enlightenment. The second section covers the rising importance of laboratory experimentation and new theories of animal chemistry along with increasingly materialist theories of mind and disturbed appetite. The third section examines the effect of Darwinism and new precision experimentation on the development of "animal psychology" and comparative morphology. Finally, in part 4, the hard question of appetite's ontology is set aside in favor of observable, quantifiable feeding behaviors that could be manipulated by products of the laboratory. In each chapter, Williams diligently recounts the major contours of the relevant ideas of the major thinkers in the history of Western science and medicine: Hippocrates, Galen, Descartes, Bichat, Darwin, Pavlov, Freud. One of the main reasons, according to Williams, that the nature of appetite was particularly challenging even for elite Western scientists to elucidate was its liminal existence between hardcore digestive physiology and ethereal social and psychological theories of mind. Regardless of their home discipline, Williams's scientists (themselves often fighting across unbridgeable philosophical gaps: mechanism and vitalism, experimentalism and bedside therapeutics, somaticism and behaviorism) largely shied away from the word appetite in their investigations, preferring to study nearby concepts described as psychic excitation, instincts, ingestive activity, or gastric neuroses. Because scientists across centuries and different disciplines including "physiology, natural history … psychology and ethology" could not agree on a common physical or mental understanding of the appetitive impulse, many investigators answered proxy questions instead, [End Page 277] nipping away at the edges of the problem by examining neighboring concerns about the intricacies of digestive physiology or by exploring links between hunger and the nervous system, hormones, or patterns in animal behavior (4). When first attempting to locate the appetite in the body, physiologists quickly realized they needed more sophisticated models of the structure and behavior of the many intersecting bodily systems involved in digestion: organs, muscles, nerves, glands. Was the stomach itself really "feeling" hungry? If not, how did the brain know the stomach was empty or full? Albrecht von Haller's idea of a brawny stomach that forcefully ground food to a paste with its undulating musculature yielded a different vision of appetite than did Lazzaro Spallanzani's vision of the stomach as a largely passive sac of powerful acid (62). Similar paradigmatic transformations occurred for other body systems, yet none of these physiological models yielded much insight for clinicians tasked with monitoring patients' fickle appetites at the bedside. Unlike physiologists, physicians had to be perpetually aware that the appetite could be profoundly influenced by a patient's emotional state, the progress of their disease, and many other contingencies that the reigning physiology of...

Tooling and Construction: From Nut-Cracking and Stone-Tool Making to Bird Nests and Language

The present paper provides an integrative theory of actions and motor programs for skill in tool use, construction, and language. We analyze preconditions for action as well as making their effects (postconditions) explicit, emphasizing the “how” of action details as well as the “what” of motor programs, aided by conceptual analysis of several brain modeling efforts. The theory is exemplified by analysis of the subtractive construction involved in percussive tooling by capuchin monkeys and Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool making by protohumans before turning to the additive construction of hafted tools. A complementary analysis focused on the construction of bird nests explores the notion of “image” and “stage” in construction. We offer a brief comparison with birdsong before arguing for a very different relation between communication and construction in humans. Pantomime lifts manipulation from practical to communicative action in protohumans, and we consider the role of pedagogy before offering hypotheses on the emergence of human language that suggest how language may have evolved from manual skills. We note that language provides an open-ended means for devising innovations in tool use and construction, but reiterate the importance of this framework for diverse future studies in ethology and comparative psychology.

Linguistic structure and the languages-of-thought.

Quilty-Dunn et al. adopt a methodology for psychology connecting behavioral capacities to the format of the mental systems underlying them. This methodology opens up avenues connecting linguistic theory to comparative psychology. On the assumption that language structures thought, identifying the formal structure of human language can generate hypotheses connecting distinctively human cognitive traits to the distinctive structures of human language.

Proceedings of the 83th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Animal Psychology

Proceedings of the 83th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Animal Psychology

Use of TSD, CSS or CLOSE maze to measure spatial navigation, working memory, Reference memory, memory errors, locomotor activity and anxiety-like behavior in Rats

The Open Field Maze was one of the utmost frequently used platforms for assessment of behavioral profile of model animals. Initially an Open-Field use was defined in Hall and Ballechey’s 1932 paper, “A study of the rat’s behavior in a field: a contribution to method in comparative psychology”. Open Field Test (OFT) was a modest apparatus used in evaluation of limited behavioral profile anxiety, exploration, and locomotion activity. TSD (time space determinant) maze, CSS or CLOSE maze was recently developed in our laboratory aimed to find the cells involved in earlier food seeking behavior in rats given food stimulus in short and long pathway. However, it demonstrates relatively optimal test that provide a various information of behavior ranging from motor activity, anxiety, emotionality, spatial navigation, cognition, memory and memory errors to wide range of exploratory behaviors of tested animal evaluated via TSD maze equipped with video tracking software. A TSD maze comprised of a wall-enclosed area with adequate height prevents the rats to escape from maze. The TSD maze was recently used platform for evaluation of behavioral and neurophysiology of freely exploring animal especially rodents. This procedure will readily become useful to investigate the effect of different pharmacological compounds and toxicants on learning and memory as well as their anxiolytic and anxiogenic effects.

A Forward-Looking Theory of Content

In this essay, I provide a forward-looking naturalized theory of mental content designed to accommodate predictive processing approaches to the mind, which are growing in popularity in philosophy and cognitive science. The view is introduced by relating it to one of the most popular backward-looking teleosemantic theories of mental content, Fred Dretske’s informational teleosemantics. It is argued that such backward-looking views (which locate the grounds of mental content in the agent’s evolutionary or learning history) face a persistent tension between ascribing determinate contents and allowing for the possibility of misrepresentation. A way to address this tension is proposed by grounding content attributions in the agent’s own ability to detect when it has represented the world incorrectly through the assessment of prediction errors—which in turn allows the organism to more successfully represent those contents in the future. This opens up space for misrepresentation, but that space is constrained by the forward-directed epistemic capacities that the agent uses to evaluate and shape its own representational strategies. The payoff of the theory is illustrated by showing how it can be applied to interpretive disagreements over content ascriptions amongst scientists in comparative psychology and ethology. This theory thus provides a framework in which to make content attributions to representations posited by an exciting new family of predictive approaches to cognition, and in so doing addresses persistent tensions with the previous generation of naturalized theories of content.

The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology, A review of the book by Alfred Binet

This article introduces the little-known contributions of Alfred Binet to comparative psychology. While Binet’s contributions to intelligence testing are well known and widely discussed in introductory psychology and history of psychology texts, his contributions to comparative psychology are largely forgotten. To acquaint textbook writers and students with Binet’s contributions, we review his 1889 book The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology. This book details his observations of the behavior of microscopic organisms. We discuss each of the nine chapters and close with speculation of how his book may have helped develop his problem solving tests.

The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences.

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate-argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures - that is, LoTs - only prove more flexible and well-supported over time.

Making Drawings Speak Through Mathematical Metrics.

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child's skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to two different datasets (N = 65 and N = 344) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with color metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. Gender had no effect, but age influenced all three dimensions differently. These analyses for instance differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We discussed the perspectives of such findings in comparative psychology and evolutionary anthropology.

Reading perspectives on feeling and the semiotics of emotion

Abstract This interdisciplinary approach to the semiotics of emotion offers insights on emotion as a semantic category organising an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations into meaningful (communicable) terms. This is achieved via an exploration of the role of perspective-taking in making meanings that are felt rather than expressly articulated through words. Forming a semiotic system based on embodied experiences and their contexts, emotions, as semantic categories, are the first stage in processes of expression and communication. I lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary semiotics of emotion in accordance with findings and stances taken in the fields of literary and cultural studies, neuroscience, and cognitive and comparative psychology. Narrative empathy (sometimes called narrative emotion), like emotion per se, stands upon processes of communication involving the interpretive capacities of feeling, cognitive processes of identification, and perspective-taking. Feeling, beginning as an interpretation of sensorial and neurologically driven values, intensifies through the cognitive-affectual interpretative processes of perspective-taking. With recursive (multi-perspectival) feeling resulting in intensifications of feeling we recognise as emotion, I define emotion as a complex recursive pattern of feeling and affect that calls attention to itself in terms that are readily identifiable with semantic categories such as love, hate, shame, sadness, and anger.

Minding behavior.

Perhaps the most popular definition of psychology is the science of mind and behavior. However, the interrelation between mind and behavior is one of continuing controversy. The present paper examines this enduring issue from the perspectives of George J. Romanes, an early comparative psychologist, Edwin G. Boring, an influential experimental psychologist, and Howard Rachlin, an estimable recent behaviorist. Their respective positions shed considerable light on both the theory and practice of behavioral psychology.

Vocal learning, chorusing seal pups, and the evolution of rhythm

The presence of vocal learning and rhythm capacities in only a few mammals drives a cross-species hypothesis in evolutionary neuroscience: vocal learning and rhythm perception and synchronization may be causally related. Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are among these mammals, and their puppyhood is the most active vocal period in their lives. Building on both comparative psychology and animal behavior, this research integrates methods from human cognition with attention to species’ ecological sensory niches. We present data from seal pups in four different setups: recordings of semi-natural vocal interactions in (1) individual and (2) group settings, (3) playback experiments to elicit vocal responses, and (4) perceptual listening experiments to measure behavioral responses. We complement empirical data with agent-based computational modeling aimed at reverse-engineering the putative mechanisms underlying rhythmic vocal interactions. Our data suggest that seal pups have developed capacities to produce and perceive rhythmic patterns. Seals’ vocal exchanges show rhythmic interactivity and antisynchronous coordination. Evidence for antisynchrony, rather than synchrony, in seals suggests that the rhythm-vocal learning link across species is more complex than previously surmised.

Rules and metarules: Adult cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) and 5-year-old children (Homo sapiens) can master both.

Developmental psychologists have noted a similar timeline of change for children's use of different perspectives about the same objects or events, as in the use of different labels for the same object, an aspect of language, and in understanding other's knowledge or beliefs, an aspect of social cognition as reviewed in the study by Neiworth et al. Comparative psychologists are interested to know what cognitive flexibility looks like in other species and how such variation relates to life history, ecology, and phylogeny. The general pattern of results to date indicates that monkeys can master both intra- and interdimensional shifts, but intradimensional shifts are learned far more quickly than interdimensional shifts (reviewed in the study by Neiworth et al, 2022). Neiworth et al. report that they have conducted exactly this kind of comparative study: They examined cognitive flexibility in adult cotton-top tamarins and human children in three age groups as they participated in a modified version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). Neiworth et al.'s study offers an example of careful consideration of one such possibility: that of using the experimenter's postural orientation to the cards as an inadvertent aid. Here the authors had the benefit of prior work showing that tamarins follow human-provided cues to make a spatially discriminated choice only if the experimenter's head, body, and eyes oriented to a particular location. Thus, in this study, the experimenter kept their head and body centered in the testing space between the two cards and looked at a point on the wall directly behind the midpoint of the testing tray. But the DCCS task, in abstract form, has potentially broader comparative value than to examine cognitive flexibility in primates alone. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The OpenFeeder: A flexible automated RFID feeder to measure interspecies and intraspecies differences in cognitive and behavioural performance in wild birds

Abstract Understanding the ecology and evolution of personality and cognition requires the development of new tools to measure individual and species differences in behavioural and cognitive performances in wild populations. Furthermore, such tools should facilitate collection of large sample sizes, evaluate the repeatability of measured traits and allow direct comparison of species performances across a variety of behavioural tasks. Here we present a RFID‐based feeder (OpenFeeder) designed to run visual cognitive tasks in wild animals. We illustrate the flexibility of the tool showing performances of three wild passerine species (Parus major, Cyanistes caeruleus and Poecile palustris) in an associative learning task. We recorded performances of a large number of individuals (>300) in the wild and showed both interspecific and intraspecific differences in associative learning. We also found moderate to high repeatability in individual differences in associative learning in each species. We show that the OpenFeeder is a flexible tool to record performance in multiple cognitive and behavioural tasks in free‐ranging animals across a variety of passerine species. The design, firmware and software are open source to facilitate use in a wide variety of species and thus allow continuous improvement of the system and development of new behavioural and cognitive tasks. In doing so, we hope that this tool will be used by a large community of cognitive ecologists and comparative psychologists for both within and across species studies. Furthermore, our system should facilitate replication of results across populations along large‐scale environmental gradients to improve our understanding of the role ecology plays in the evolution of cognitive traits.

Taming the boojum: Being theoretical about peculiarities of learning.

The case of the "biological constraints" movement in mid-20th-century psychology provides a reminder of the weight of psychology's reliance on theory and theory-driven methods. By 1980, a critical mass of demonstrations of the specificity of learning had eroded faith in general-process approaches. A common reaction was to call for a biological orientation. However, this proved not as straightforward as it had seemed, and much of the ostensibly biological research that followed was atheoretical. The successes in this context were due to careful theoretical work by people who appreciated the aims of the involved sciences and the interdependence of the aims with methods. Michael Domjan slowed the field's haphazard rush into ostensible biological research, and rather urged adoption of principled biological approaches. In 1982, his positive recommendation was for comparative psychology to begin to live up to its name, and adopt principled comparative methods as practised in biology. Although lauded, few followed this recommendation. Indeed, even Domjan's own subsequent research was mostly not comparative in the way he had described, but rather involved single species, guided by a behaviour systems approach. With reference to two major perspectives associated with Domjan-comparative methods and behaviour systems theory-I present Domjan's challenge not as being to make our field comparative per se, but to make it theoretical. This challenge remains current.

Analysis and/or Interpretation in Neurophysiology? A Transatlantic Discussion Between F. J. J. Buytendijk and K. S. Lashley, 1929–1932

In the interwar period, biologists employed a diverse set of holistic approaches that were connected to different research methodologies. Against this background, this article explores attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to negotiate quantitative and qualitative methods in the field of neurophysiology. It focuses on the work of two scientists on different sides of the Atlantic: the Dutch animal psychologist and physiologist Frederik J.J. Buytendijk and the American neuropsychologist Karl S. Lashley, specifically analyzing their critical correspondence, 1929–1932, on the problems surrounding the term intelligence. It discusses the inexplicable anomalies in neurophysiology as well as the reliability of quantitative and qualitative methods. While in his laboratory work Lashley adhered to a strictly analytic approach, Buytendijk tried to combine quantitative methods with phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. The starting point of their discussion is Lashley’s monograph on Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence (1929) and the rat experiments discussed therein. Buytendijk questioned the viability of the maze-learning method and the use of statistics to test intelligence in animals; he reproduced Lashley’s experiments and then confronted Lashley with his critical findings. In addition to elucidating this exchange, this paper will, more generally, shed light on the nature of the disagreements and shared assumptions prevalent among interwar neurophysiologists. In turn, it contributes to historiographical debates on localization and functionalism and the discrepancy between analytic (quantitative) and interpretative (qualitative) approaches.

Consciousness, objectivity, and bias in comparative psychology

Consciousness, objectivity, and bias in comparative psychology

Illusional Perspective across Humans and Bees.

For two centuries, visual illusions have attracted the attention of neurobiologists and comparative psychologists, given the possibility of investigating the complexity of perceptual mechanisms by using relatively simple patterns. Animal models, such as primates, birds, and fish, have played a crucial role in understanding the physiological circuits involved in the susceptibility of visual illusions. However, the comprehension of such mechanisms is still a matter of debate. Despite their different neural architectures, recent studies have shown that some arthropods, primarily Hymenoptera and Diptera, experience illusions similar to those humans do, suggesting that perceptual mechanisms are evolutionarily conserved among species. Here, we review the current state of illusory perception in bees. First, we introduce bees’ visual system and speculate which areas might make them susceptible to illusory scenes. Second, we review the current state of knowledge on misperception in bees (Apidae), focusing on the visual stimuli used in the literature. Finally, we discuss important aspects to be considered before claiming that a species shows higher cognitive ability while equally supporting alternative hypotheses. This growing evidence provides insights into the evolutionary origin of visual mechanisms across species.

Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment.

Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing (such as Chess and Go) towards ability-oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain kinds of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriented testing used in comparative psychology to AI systems. Here, we present the first direct human-AI comparison in the Animal-AI Environment, using children aged 6–10 (n = 52). We found that children of all ages were significantly better than a sample of 30 AIs across most of the tests we examined, as well as performing significantly better than the two top-scoring AIs, “ironbar” and “Trrrrr,” from the Animal-AI Olympics Competition 2019. While children and AIs performed similarly on basic navigational tasks, AIs performed significantly worse in more complex cognitive tests, including detour tasks, spatial elimination tasks, and object permanence tasks, indicating that AIs lack several cognitive abilities that children aged 6–10 possess. Both children and AIs performed poorly on tool-use tasks, suggesting that these tests are challenging for both biological and non-biological machines.