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Approaches to the study of animal intelligence
Author(s) -
Mackintosh N. J.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1988.tb02749.x
Subject(s) - comparative psychology , psychology , cognitive psychology , comparative cognition , set (abstract data type) , animal cognition , abstraction , animal learning , rote learning , task (project management) , cognitive science , argument (complex analysis) , social psychology , cognition , epistemology , mathematics education , cooperative learning , teaching method , biochemistry , chemistry , management , neuroscience , computer science , economics , programming language , philosophy
One tradition has seen the task of comparative psychology as that of ordering animals by their degree of intelligence. A more appropriate goal for psychology, however, is to elucidate the structure of animal intelligence, and comparative studies have a valuable part to play in this endeavour. Thus rather than being content to show that several species can be rank ordered by their performance on, say, learning sets, comparative psychologists would be better occupied analysing the nature of the processes involved in learning‐set formation and seeing whether animals more or less proficient at learning sets differed in terms of these presumed processes. This argument is illustrated by an analysis of the behaviour of crows and pigeons which suggests that they differ not only in learning‐set formation but also in other tasks that require the abstraction of a general rule across a change of stimuli. Put crudely, pigeons are rote learners, crows rule learners.