Customer Reviews

The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition

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This book is a large collection of short papers, somewhat comparable in style to what you would get in a peer-reviewed journal. I found many of them dull, but a few were good enough to make the book worth buying.
Slobodchikoff's paper on prairie dog speech is what attracted me to the book; it's interesting but doesn't say enough to provide a convincing answer to my questions about how sophisticated their grammar is.
Several of the papers provide nice anecdotes of sophisticated behavior where I didn't expect it (e.g. apparently detailed planning by a spider), but I sometimes wonder to what extent there's a selection bias that causes complex behavior to be overemphasized in reports of this nature, since they're more interesting to read than reports of animals failing to exhibit smart behavior.