Animal Memory and Cognition

Abstract Behaviorism, a dominant movement in animal learning until about 1970, emphasized that the subject matter of psychology is behavior. Originating about 1970 was a concern with animal cognition, a movement that emphasized to a considerable extent laboratory investigations in animals of processes commonly attributed to humans such as serial learning, numerical processes, categorization, inference formation, rule learning, and language learning. This approach, which is very much alive at present, assumes that animal cognition is a less complex version of human cognition. Several other approaches to animal cognition, while not necessarily rejecting the view that animal and human cognition are similar in some respects, seek to identify learning and cognitive processes that may be unique to particular species. This approach, characteristic of, for example, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology and cognitive ethology, may employ in addition to laboratory investigations, an examination of behavior in the animals environmental niche. Examples of this approach would include communication in vervet monkeys, navigation over long distances in birds and other animals, social and other behavior in chimpanzees. Each of these broad approaches has something to contribute. On the one hand it is generally agreed that there are some processes common to a variety of species such as the sort of associative learning that occurs under Pavlovian conditioning. On the other hand, others forms of learning and cognition may be species typical, such as echolocation in bats and language learning in humans.