Research In Comparative Psychology Research Articles

La Teoría de Género y el Enfoque Determinista

This work analyzes some considerations around biological determinism, linking them to social and racial inequality, intelligence, and comparative psychology research positions. This work is based on gender theory, which allows us to explain the fact that humankind is not just a product of nature, but one of historic processes and bio-social-cultural conditions. The epistemological posture ofthis theory is in the subject, where the historic dimension is not only an axia of analysis, but a part of epistemology. This leads to a subject structured through different institutions this breaking dual structures about reality and human behavior.

The Comparative Psychology Of Paul Schiller

The work of Paul H. Schiller is generally treated in a fragmentary manner. There is no comprehensive overview of his oeuvre. I review the system developed by Schiller and the research related to it and relate both to the work of other researchers. Schiller’s system was organized around innate motor patterns and the manner in which they are integrated into functional patterns of action related to the environment. His diverse studies are cited in various contexts and it is especially interesting to note how a single result can be adapted to different contexts. Although Schiller died in 1949 many aspects of his work are relevant to research in comparative psychology in the 1990s.

Expert and novice intuitive judgments about animal behavior

Although research in comparative psychology often relies on direct behavioral observation for data gathering, the influence of the observer is often overlooked. To study the effect of expertise on making judgments about behavior, novices and experts observed videotapes of rats from enriched and impoverished environments and attempted to determine each rat’s history. The judgment accuracy of all groups exceeded chance. Although experts used a broader vocabulary for describing the foundations of their judgments concerning animal behavior, novices were as accurate as experts at making the discrimination. Subjects were not able to correctly assess their own accuracy. The results of this study suggest that observer expertise does influence the data-gathering process in comparative psychology, but in indirect and often subtle ways.

Visual spatial memory in aboriginal and white Australian children

Abstract A research approach based on probable cognitive skills of desert Aboriginal people was derived from suggestions for research in comparative psychology made by Lockard (1971), and from contradictory reports of high Aboriginal skill in difficult environmental circumstances and inferior performance in school and on IQ tests. Aboriginal children and adolescents of both semi-traditional and non-traditional groups performed significantly better than White Australian subjects on visual spatial memory tasks requiring memory for spatial location of a kind postulated as useful in desert way-finding. This difference was seen to support a genetic hypothesis, on the assumption that non-traditional Aboriginal children were reared like White Australian children. It is now apparent that this assumption is unjustified, and that many traditional child-rearing practices are maintained by non-traditional Aboriginal people, even of the city, which may be important for the development of particular cognitive skills. T...

Levels of Analysis in Comparative Psychology

Summary Three levels of analysis in comparative psychology are described: studies of one species, studies of several species, and cross-species correlational studies. The latter technique is rarely found in comparative psychology research, but it has great potential for the study of relationships between behaviors and for the discovery of general laws of behavior.