PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Symposium on Animal Cognition THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF COGNITION IN ANIMALS

Abstract-The origins and current status ofcomparative cognitive psychology are examined. Great strides have been made in the last 20 years, but two problems are identified as obstacles to future prog-ress. One is the very limited number of species studied by comparative cognitive psychologists. The second is the conflict between the increasing use of complex stimulus discriminations and the need for precise stimulus control in animal ex-periments. An expanded examination of more species as selected by phylogenetic and ecological considerations and an unwavering demand for the experimen-tal identification of the controlling fea-1Ilres of complex discriminations are suggested as solutions to these difficul-ties. It is now widely recognized that sub-stantial changes have occurred in the last 20 years in how we think about the mechanisms underlying animal behavior. The first fruits of this change were seen in the edited volume Cognitive Pro-cesses in Animal Behavior (Hulse, Fowler, & Honig, 1978). This book con-tained a wide-ranging collection of new findings, reformulations of old ques-tions, and programmatic summaries that fashioned a new focus to the compara-tive study of psychological mechanisms in animals-from its almost exclusive fo-cus on learning to a considerably broader examination of cognitive processes in general. Thus, the modem comparative study of cognition seeks to understand how animals encode, transform, com-pute, and manipulate symbolic represen-tations of the real world's spatial, tem-poral, and causal texture for the pur-poses of adaptively organizing their behavior. The most important catalyst for this Address correspondence to Robert G