Animal Intelligence From Individual to Social Cognition

About this book

From ants to whales, the lives of animals are filled with challenges that demand minute-by-minute decisions: to fight or flee, dominate or obey, take-off, share, eat, spit out or court. Learning develops adaptive tuning to a changeable environment, while intelligence helps animals use their learned experiences in new situations.

Using examples from field to laboratory, Animal Intelligence: From Individual to Social Cognition pools resources from ethology, behavioural ecology and comparative psychology to help the reader enter the world of wild intelligence through the analysis of adventures, of ideas and methods, rather than through theoretic modelling. It reminds us that there is a world of intellectual biodiversity out there, providing a multi-faceted panorama of animal intelligence.

Contents

Part I. Development of Ideas and Methods in Studying Animal Intelligence
1. Evolution of views on animal intelligence
2. Dramatic adventures of behaviourism
3. Intelligence under a scalpel: starts and false starts of neuroscience
4. Integrative approaches and coherent movement in studying animal intelligence
5. Ethological approaches for studying animal learning

Part II. Animals are Welcome to the Class: Learning Classes
6. Habituation and associative learning
7. Learning classes beyond 'simple' associative learning

Part III. Past and Future in Animal Life: Remembering, Updating and Anticipation
8. What memory is for an intelligent animal?
9. Chicks do not suffer from schizophrenia: briefly about brain mechanisms for processing and storing memory
10. Behavioural mechanisms of experience of time

Part IV. To be in Time in the Right Place: Representation of Space and Objects in Animal Mind
11. Navigation strategies in animals
12. To what degree mapping is cognitive in animals?
13. 'Object permanence' in animals

Part V. Experimental Approaches to Studying Essential Activities of Animal Intelligence
14. Conditional discrimination as a basic technique for studying rule learning
15. Categorisation, abstraction, and concept formation: are animals logical?
16. Conceptual behaviour based on relations

Part VI. Advanced Intelligence in Animals: Rule Extraction, Tool Using and Number Related Skills
17. Insightful behaviour
18. Tool using as a tool for experimental studying of animal intelligence
19. Numerical competence in animals

Part VII. Knowledge is Power but not for all: Species-Specific Intelligence
20. Is finding a common metric of intelligence possible in real animal life?
21. A sketch on instinctive behaviour
22. Guided learning and cognitive specialisation
23. Developmental studies of animal intelligence: role of innate and acquired behaviour
24. Imprinting

Part VIII. The Wisdom by Social Learning
25. Ecological and cognitive aspects of social learning
26. The spread of innovation within populations
27. Culture in animal societies

Part IX. Intelligent Communication
28. Can animals exchange meaningful messages?
29. Communication, speech and language: what falls to the share of non humans?
30. Direct dialogue with animals: language-training experiments
31. A battle for the Rosetta Stone: attempts to decipher animals' signals
32. A dialogue with a black box: using of ideas and methods of information theory for studying animal communication

Part X. Social Life and Social Intelligence in the wild
33. Diversity of social systems in animals
34. Evolutionary and behavioural aspects of altruism in animals
35. Intelligence in a context of the functional structure of animals' communities
36. What sort of intelligence is required to navigate social landscapes?
37. Theory of mind

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Biography

Zhanna Reznikova is Head of the Department of Comparative Psychology at the Novosibirsk State University, and Head of the Laboratory of Community Ecology at the Institute for Animal Systematics & Ecology, Siberia. She is a researcher and professor in the fields of ethology, behavioural ecology, and the behaviour and ecology of social insects.