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Open Access Publications from the University of California

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The International Journal of Comparative Psychology is sponsored by the International Society for Comparative Psychology. It is a peer-reviewed open-access digital journal that publishes studies on the evolution and development of behavior in all animal species. It accepts research articles and reviews, letters and audiovisual submissions.

Volume 6, Issue 2, 1992

Research Article

The Mind of Organisms: Some Issues About Animal Cognition

The study of animal behavior and intelligence has a fairly long tradition, starting with Romanes naive mentalism. With a few noble exceptions, like Tolman and Kohler, psychological research on animals has been dominated by the behaviorist paradigm, and only in the last fifteen years has there been a substantial growth of interest in the analysis of cognitive processes in animals. This renewed impetus towards a cognitive approach, as opposed to a strict behaviorist perspective, resulted from both internal problems and external influences: on the one hand, there were difficulties in explaining all instances of behavior within the traditional S-R approach; on the other, mental concepts were gaining a new scientific respectability, thanks to the development of human cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence

 

 

 

Animal Cognition as Part of Cognitive Science: A Fringe Activity?

This paper on "The mind of organisms" by Prato Previde, Colombetti,PoH and Spada provides an excellent account of the aims and assumptions underlying contemporary research in animal cognition.