Field and Laboratory Methods in Animal Cognition: A Comparative Guide

Description

Would you ask a honeybee to point at a screen and recognise a facial expression? Or ask an elephant to climb a tree? While humans and non-human species may inhabit the same world, it's likely that our perceptual worlds differ significantly. Emphasising Uexkull's concept of 'umwelt', this volume offers practical advice on how animal cognition can be successfully tested while avoiding anthropomorphic conclusions. The chapters describe the capabilities of a range of animals - from ants, to lizards to chimpanzees - revealing how to successfully investigate animal cognition across a variety of taxa. The book features contributions from leading cognition researchers, each offering a series of examples and practical tips drawn from their own experience. Together, the authors synthesise information on current field and laboratory methods, providing researchers and graduate students with methodological advice on how to formulate research questions, design experiments and adapt studies to different taxa.

Nereida Bueno-Guerra is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Comillas Pontifical University, Spain. With a background in psychology and criminology, as well as ethology and education, her research focuses on the topics of morality and revenge. Her interest in animal cognition began while conducting comparative studies of chimpanzees and humans at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI). Federica Amici is a post-doctoral researcher in the Primate Kin Selection Group at the University of Leipzig and at the MPI. Her main research interests lie in the evolutionary forces shaping the distribution of cognitive skills across vertebrates, combining behavioural observations and controlled experimental procedures, both in the wild and in captivity.

'Field and Laboratory Methods in Animal Cognition, edited by Bueno-Guerra and Amici, manages also to implicitly teach some of the fundamentals of cognition in the way it showcases methods. By illuminating how similar cognitive principles need to be tested differently across species, the existence of the volume itself proves the importance of the 'Umwelt' concept it champions. With a star-studded lineup of authors, the book serves as a snapshot of who is doing what and how in the field of comparative cognition.' Alison L. Greggor, The Quarterly Review of Biology