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.

Tribute to E. J. Capaldi: Celebration of a Psychological Scientist

“…John's interest in animal cognition, and his constant pursuit of knowledge, led him to begin to explore the arguments coming from cognitive ethology and evolutionary psychology. John often cited specific species-typical behaviors as evidence in favor of evolutionary as well as associative approaches to understanding animal (including human) behavior (Capaldi, 2003;Capaldi & Martins, 2013). His final cohort of graduate students included three students interested in evolutionary approaches to human behavior.…”

Up to the magical number seven: An evolutionary perspective on the capacity of short term memory

“…This means that fewer subgoals and, therefore, fewer steps are necessary to solve a problem ( Bayazitoglu et al., 1993 ). Chunking has also been proposed to be a form of the brain's categorization or organization ( Capaldi, 2003 ; Fonollosa et al., 2015 ).…”

“…For example, Macuda and Roberts (1995) indicated that rats use chunking in a spatial memory task (i.e., radial maze) when it is possible and this improves their performance. In a review of literature, Capaldi (2003) described three different sorts of chunks of varying degrees of complexity (i.e., trial , series , and list ) and maintained that rates are able to use all of them. The first and second types of chunking described by him (i.e., trial, series) are respectively what have been called simple and hierarchical chunking in the present review.…”