Comparative cognition—Conceptual and methodological advancements.

This special issue originally placed a Call for Papers that emphasized the importance of “Conceptual and Methodological” advances in the field of Comparative Cognition. Represented here is a collection of 14 papers that helps to display some of the diversity of ideas and approaches within this flourishing research area. The first paper in this issue, by Gazes and Lazareva (2021), discusses transitive inference learning from the perspectives of: identifying the problems of contextual variables in studying different species; whether associative processes can or cannot fully account for the behavior and, if not, what alternative representational mechanisms might be at work; and, finally, how ecological considerations may support comparative research by suggesting novel theoretical and empirical questions. The next paper, by Loy et al. (2021) investigates questions related to the complexity of learning in invertebrate species, single-celled organisms, and plants. The paper by Rawlings et al. (2021) reviews the literature on cumulative cultural evolution, primarily in nonhuman primate species, and critically evaluates the importance of identifying the essential conceptual and methodological issues in what many have deemed to be a uniquely human form of behavior. The paper by Goto and Watanabe (2021) explores whether the mouse visual system is sensitive to Gestalt principles, using operant discrimination learning tasks similar to those used previously to document Gestalt proces...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - Category: Zoology Source Type: research