ABSTRACT
Psychology.—Although animal intelligence was already a theme of ancient writings (in Western tradition, at least since Plato and Aristotle), René Descartes’s doctrine of dualism (→DUALISM/MONISM) has played a major role in modern scientific thinking about animal cognition. Accord-ing to Descartes, animals are like automata and as such, are devoid of reason. By separating the mind (→MIND) from the mechanical characteristics of bodies, which are common to all organisms, Descartes’s dualism and “animal-machine” theory nevertheless paved the way to modern physiology and later to comparative psychology. The latter field grew, in particular, out of Darwinism and its hypotheses on kinships among animal species. According to Charles Darwin, all animal species are situated along a continuum that encompasses not only anatomy but also mental faculties. This evolutionary theory provided the groundwork for the comparative study of intelligence across species, and in particular, between animals and humans. Human psychology added a number of unifying concepts applicable to all “intelligent” behaviors, such as problem solving and attention. These concepts, in conjunction with representation and memory supplied by information theory (→ATTENTION, INFORMATION, MEMORY, REPRESENTATION), laid a solid foundation for the upsurge of a cognitive psychology, both animal and human, that could stand up against behaviorism’s innate learning models (→LEARNING). Another contribution of human psychology was to devise methods (such as mental chronometry) for the experimental study of cognition, which both complemented and extended methods borrowed from conditioning procedures.
