English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence by Nathan Emery. 2016. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA. 192 pp., 175 color illustrations. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 9780691165172. Also available as an e-book from Amazon or Google Play for $16. Over the past 30 years, the study of bird behavior has been completely transformed by the ongoing revolution in cognitive psychology, opening up wholly new perspectives on the mental processes underlying such areas as foraging decisions, social intelligence, problem solving, memory encoding, and communication. Although these studies have contributed to a number of recent popular books, until now there has been no attempt to integrate avian cognition and recent findings in avian neuroanatomy and endocrinology into a single account that is attractive and accessible to a general readership. It is a steep challenge, but Nathan Emery has undertaken it in his remarkable new volume, Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence. The book has a very interesting hierarchical structure. It consists of seven substantial chapters on separate broad issues—cognitive evolution, spatial memory, communication, sociality, tool making, metacognition, and a summary. Each chapter, in turn, is broken into a set of short essays (of one to three pages) on parallel topics or lines of experimentation that develop and amplify the chapter theme. It is a very intuitive approach. Modern introductory textbooks often attempt to do the same thing by spreading sidebars and text boxes all across the page, making it look like a newspaper website. Readers will find Emery’s innovation far less cluttered and easier to follow. The illustrations are really superb. The large format enables Emery to use big, striking images that draw the reader’s interest. And he has some of the finest experimental diagrams I have seen in any behavior book. This is especially important in the later chapters on complex cognition, where the crucial studies use experimental designs that are very hard to envision from a purely wordbased description. By far the best and clearest writing occurs in the chapters on spatial and social cognition and tool making, which flow well and should be fascinating to the general ornithological reader. Several sections in the first third of the book, however, seem either oversimplified or dense and uninspired. More problematic are the many chapters that include one or more essays on the underlying neurobiology. It is understandable that Emery should have chosen to do this, because brain anatomy is one of his primary fields of expertise. But it does not generally work well. The accompanying diagrams are overly complex, sprinkled with opaque abbreviations and meaningless icons. The text of these essays includes unexplained terminology that may

the auk/the auk

<i>Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence</i><b>Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence</b> by Nathan Emery. 2016. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA. 192 pp., 175 color illustrations. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 9780691165172. Also available as an e-book from Amazon or Google Play for $16.