The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (Paperback)

~ (Editor), Colin Allen (Editor), Gordon Burghardt (Editor) "I have been interested in the scientific knowledge of animal life and in how presuppositions, structures of argumentation, and language express and shape that knowledge..." (more)
Key Phrases: cognitive neuroethology, generalized bodily imitation, novel numerosities, New York, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Cognitive Animal is the most complete and up-to-date collection of available information on the study of animal cognitive abilities. The articles, covering numerous species and areas of research, are written in a way that makes the information accessible to readers who are not specialists in the cognitive sciences. This book also makes clear that a great deal more research needs to be done in this field, and it presents a challenging future agenda. The more we understand about the cognitive skills of the amazing animals with whom we share our planet, the greater will be our respect for them."
—Jane Goodall, author of Reason for Hope and The Chimpanzees of Gombe

Product Description

The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals discussed include antelopes, bees, dogs, dolphins, earthworms, fish, hyenas, parrots, prairie dogs, rats, ravens, sea lions, snakes, spiders, and squirrels. The topics include (but are not limited to) definitions of cognition, the role of anecdotes in the study of animal cognition, anthropomorphism, attention, perception, learning, memory, thinking, consciousness, intentionality, communication, planning, play, aggression, dominance, predation, recognition, assessment of self and others, social knowledge, empathy, conflict resolution, reproduction, parent-young interactions and caregiving, ecology, evolution, kin selection, and neuroethology.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (June 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262523221
• ISBN-13: 978-0262523226
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #606,928 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Occasionally Interesting, January 26, 2007

By	Peter McCluskey (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.