Founders & Methods
This 'law of parsimony' says never credit an animal with a higher mental process when a lower one explains the behavior.
What is Morgan's Canon?
C. Lloyd Morgan (1894)
Von Uexküll’s term for the sensory world each species lives in.
What is the Umwelt?
This New Caledonian crow bent a straight wire into a hook to fish food out of a tube.
Who is Betty?
Gallup’s 1970 test: put a mark where an animal can see it only in a mirror, then see whether it touches the mark.
What is the mirror (mark) test?
The property of language that lets you talk about things that are not here or not now.
What is displacement?
One tradition saw animals as blank slates shaped in Skinner boxes; the other studied instincts like imprinting in natural settings.
What are behaviorism and ethology?
Herrnstein’s pigeons correctly sorted “people” photos they had never seen before, showing they had formed this kind of category based on shared features.
What is a perceptual concept?
Wolfgang Köhler called Sultan’s sudden jump from failure to success, stacking boxes or joining sticks, this.
What is insight?
Copying a demonstrator’s goal but reaching it your own way, as chimps did with the see-through puzzle box.
What is goal emulation?
Akeakamai treated “pipe hoop fetch” differently from “hoop pipe fetch,” showing she understood this.
What is syntax (word order)?
Measuring two variables without manipulating either can show they’re related, but it can never establish this.
What is cause and effect?
This law predicts that a sea lion will find 9 fish vs. 10 fish much harder to tell apart than 2 vs. 10.
What is Weber’s Law?
If A outranks B and B outranks C, then A outranks C: a handy way to read a dominance hierarchy without fighting.
What is transitive inference?
Meerkats handing pups scorpions with the stingers removed meets three criteria for this.
What is teaching?
Kanzi understood far more spoken English than he could express with his lexigrams. This type of language was better than his productive language.
What is his receptive language?
Frans de Waal’s word for being so afraid of anthropomorphism that you miss real similarities between humans and animals.
What is anthropodenial?
When you count, the last number you say tells you how many items there are. That principle is called this.
What is cardinality?
Capuchins threw away their cucumber after watching a partner get a grape for the same task. This was once thought to be uniquely human.
What is inequity aversion (fairness)?
Horowitz found that this, not whether the dog actually ate the treat, produced the “guilty look.”
What is being scolded by the owner?
This border collie learned the names of 1,022 toys and could match a new name to the one toy she’d never seen before.
Who is Chaser?
She was the first woman to earn a PhD in psychology, and her 1908 book The Animal Mind argued that consciousness isn’t unique to humans.
Who is Margaret Floy Washburn?
A lone lion approaches a recording of one roar but retreats from a recording of three or four lions. This kind of number ability.
What is relative number judgment?
In Dr. Winship’s study, researchers counted how often sea lions didn’t finish this to measure their willingness to participate in training.
What is their daily diet (food)?
Only scrub jays with this kind of past experience moved their food later after being watched while caching.
What is stealing other birds’ caches?
Raising an animal with extensive human interaction and human-like language, which Dr. Lyn calls the only experimental way to separate biology from environment.
What is enculturation?