Animal Cognition A Tribute to Donald a Riley

About this book

Prepared as a tribute to Donald A. Riley, the essays that appear here are representative of a research area that has loosely been classified as animal cognition -- a categorization that reflects a functionalist philosophy that was prevalent in Riley's laboratory and that many of his students absorbed. According to this philosophy, it is acceptable to hypothesize that an animal might engage in complex processing of information, as long as one can operationalize evidence for such a process and the hypothesis can be presented in the context of testable predictions that can differentiate it from other mechanisms. The contributions to this volume represent the three most important areas of research in animal cognition -- stimulus representation, memory processes, and perceptual processes -- although current research has considerably blurred these distinctions.

Contents

Part I: Introduction
- Animal Cognition: An Approach to the Study of Animal Behavior / T.R. Zentall

Part II: Stimulus Representation
- The Stimulus Revisited: My, How You've Grown! / W.K. Honig
- When Is a Stimulus a Pattern? / A.A. Wright
- Discriminative Stimulus Control: What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get / D.R. Thomas
- Generalization Gradients of Excitation and Inhibition: Long-Term Memory for Dimensional Control and Curious Inversions During Repeated Tests with Reinforcement / E. Hearst, S. Sutton
- Retrieval Processes and Conditioning / P. Kraemer, N.E. Spear

Part III: Memory Processes
- When Memory Fails to Fail / D.C. Wright
- Foraging in Laboratory Trees: Spatial Memory in Squirrel Monkeys / W.A. Roberts, S. Mitchell, M.T. Phelps
- Sequential and Simultaneous Choice Processes in the Radial-Arm Maze / M.F. Brown
- Representations and Processes in Working Memory / H.L. Roitblat
- Coding Processes in Pigeons / D.S. Grant
- Common Coding and Stimulus Class Formation in Pigeons / T.R. Zentall, L.M. Sherburne, J.N. Steirn

Part IV: Perceptual Processes
- Attention: Neurocognitive Analyses / D.S. Olton, K. Pang, F. Merkel, H. Egeth
- Gestalt Contributions to Visual Texture Discriminations by Pigeons / R.G. Cook
- Multidimensional Stimulus Control in Pigeons: Selective Attention and Other Issues / D.L. Chatlosh, E.A. Wasserman
- From Elementary Associations to Animal Cognition: Connectionist Models of Discrimination Learning / W.S. Maki
- A Comparative, Hierarchical Theory for Object Recognition and Action / M. Rilling, L. LaClaire, M. Warner
- Absolutes and Relations in Acoustic Perception by Songbirds / S.H. Hulse

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