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- Title
Approaches to the study of animal intelligence.
- Authors
Mackintosh, N.J.
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
ANIMAL psychology testing; ANIMAL intelligence; LEARNING in animals
- Publication
British Journal of Psychology, 1988, Vol 79, Issue 4, p509
- ISSN
0007-1269
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.2044-8295.1988.tb02749.x