Book review: The primate mind: Built to connect with other minds

Many books have been written on primate psychology. What makes The Primate Mind stand out is its use of a bottom-up, as opposed to top-down, approach. The bottom-up perspective consists in identifying basic cognitive capacities that human and non-human primates share, instead of focusing on what animals might cognitively lack—i.e., ranking cognition and emphasizing a division between humans and animals. The book opens with an introduction by the editors, followed by three main sections: (1) understanding others' actions (six chapters), (2) empathy, perspective taking, and cooperation (five chapters), (3) memory, emotions and communication (four chapters), and a conclusion. Additional topics covered include Theory of Mind (ToM), altruism, consolation, social learning (imitation in particular), body scheme, mirror neurons, social rules, primate culture, visual attention, autism, and distress. While these topics are certainly more than adequate for a book on primate psychology, one would perhaps have included other classic themes such as self-awareness (e.g., agency, metacognition), self-recognition, and mental time travel. One is at first somewhat surprised to observe that some ''giants'' in the field do not contribute to the book—e. indeed possibly explain the exclusion of the aforemen-tioned topics. I suspect that there are two main reasons for this: (1) all contributions are based on work presented at a 2009 conference meeting in Italy; the researchers cited above were not part of the conference, and (2) some of these authors are identified by the editors as using a top-down approach that obviously conflicts with the bottom up one used throughout the book. All chapters are between 15 and 20 pages long, which means that all contributions are well balanced lengthwise. Five chapters out of 15 (excluding the introduction and conclusion) are neurobiologically oriented; the others are based on naturalistic observations of captive or wild primates and behaviorally oriented experimental studies. There are quite a few figures and illustrations; one notes that captions of some figures tend to duplicate text content , creating redundancy. This is a book intended for an educated audience (e.g., graduate students, researchers) yet its content is clearly and simply presented. As expected, the overall tone is formal (i.e., objective), with the exception of Chapter 16 (E.W. Menzel's section), which stands in sharp contrast because of its more personal (subjective) style. This part of the chapter seems to be somewhat more difficult to follow as it assumes in-depth knowledge of Menzel's work. It nonetheless offers remarkably wise observations …