APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGYAppl. Cognit. Psychol. 21: 137–140 (2007)

Book Reviews

Exploring animal rationality

RATIONAL ANIMALS? S. Hurley & M. Nudds (Eds.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.No. of pages 568. ISBN 0-19-852827-2. Price £29.95 (paperback).

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved somuch—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muckabout in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that theywere far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.—Douglas Adams, The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

This satirical passage highlights our unfortunate tendency, as human beings, to make uncriticalassumptions about the superiority of our own mental capacities. Indeed, many still apparentlysubscribe to the underlying conceit of Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’; namely, that rationalthought is an exclusively human attribute, while other animals are nothing more than unthinkingautomatons. But how tenable is this viewpoint in the face of current scientific knowledge?

Rational Animals, the first major edited volume to focus solely on animal rationality, has much tosay on this issue. The editors have adopted a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing togethercontributions from distinguished experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology and zoology. Thecontributors provide a series of interesting and well-argued essays that offer valuable insights intowhat is currently known about the continuities and discontinuities between the mental capacities ofhumans and those of other animals.

Mindful of the fact that their volume is likely to be of interest to researchers and students from avariety of academic disciplines, the editors have included a lengthy introduction, designed to providean accessible survey of the field of animal rationality. To this end, they begin by comparing andcontrasting rationality with a number of other traits or capacities (e.g. intelligence), and bytaxonomising the various conceptions of rationality, providing an invaluable starting point forreaders new to the area. In the remainder of the chapter, the editors provide an overview of thevarious authors’ contributions to the volume, which is peppered with useful cross-references thathighlight interesting points of contention between contributors. However, at 83 pages, moreknowledgeable readers might consider the editors’ introduction to be excessively repetitive ofmaterial contained elsewhere in the volume.

The rest of the book is divided into six parts, the first of which contains chapters focusing on thetypes and levels of rationality. With the exception of one zoologist (Kacelnik), the bulk ofcontributors to this section are philosophers (Dretske, Millikan, Bermudez and Hurley). Theirvarious contributions explore a number of senses in which animal behaviour may be regarded asrational, despite falling short of reflective, domain-general reasoning. These discussions provide arich context in which to reflect on the empirical research that is the focus of many of the subsequentchapters.

Part II addresses the key distinction between rational processes and associative learning. Papineauand Heyes, whose respective backgrounds are in philosophy and psychology, argue that this generaldistinction is unclear and lacks utility: ‘If we try to define ‘‘rational’’ in terms of representation, thenthere seems no good reason to rule out associative mechanisms as rational. And if we try to define‘‘rational’’ in terms of unlimited inferential abilities, then this idealises rationality to a degree thatrenders it useless as a research tool’ (p. 195). In contrast, Allen (another philosopher) takes the moremoderate view that the rational/associative distinction may still be useful when applied to specificcapacities. Finally, comparative psychologists Clayton, Emery and Dickinson argue that scepticsunderestimate the empirical testability of rational explanations for specific animal behaviours. Theyillustrate this point by reference to a sophisticated series of experiments investigating the apparent

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

role of intentionality in the food-caching strategies of scrub jays, the results of which cannot readilybe explained in terms of associative mechanisms alone.

Metacognition (i.e. thinking about thinking, including knowing what one knows or does not know)is the focus of Part III. Call, a comparative psychologist, reviews experimental evidence that suggestsgreat apes are aware of their own uncertainty and can act accordingly by seeking additional informationor by choosing to escape from making a difficult choice and instead accepting a less-desired reward.The ‘escape’ paradigm is also one of the main focuses of the contribution by psychologists Shettle-worth and Sutton, who provide a thorough discussion of the controls necessary to rule out non-metacognitive alternative explanations. Finally, chapters by two philosophers round off this section ofthe book: while Currie argues that pretence (including pretend play) is indicative of rationality, Proustconsiders how rationality may emerge from metacognitive adaptations to environmental problems.

In a related argument presented in Part IV, which is concerned with social cognition, Sterelny(another philosopher) posits that rationality in its most stringent sense evolved in hominids as folklogic—a means by which to assess the veracity of socially transmitted information, especially thattransmitted via language. However, other contributors examine the social cognitive processes of non-verbal animals. Primatologists Addessi and Visalberghi illustrate the dangers of drawing unwar-ranted inferences from field observations: although capuchin monkeys habitually forage in groups,experimental evidence suggests that their food preferences are not socially learned via rationalprocesses. Rather, individual learning appears merely to be subject to social biases (e.g. socialfacilitation of eating in general). Nevertheless, the value of observational research is ablydemonstrated by cetologists Connor and Mann. Citing longitudinal evidence that the sociallives of dolphins are characterised by complex interactions involving multilevel alliances, sociallearning and affiliative behaviour, they conclude that social demands provide the most plausibleexplanation for the development of dolphins’ comparatively large brains.

Social cognition is also the focus of Part V. In particular, this part addresses the extent to whichanimals can represent the psychological states of others (i.e. theory of mind). This section of thebook, more than any other, illustrates that, in relation to some issues, major differences of opinionexist among the contributors, even within the same discipline. On the one hand, althoughchimpanzees have failed in tasks assessing their ability to represent others’ beliefs, Tomasello andCall present the results of various non-verbal experiments in support of their assertion that chimpspossess at least one limited aspect of mind-reading capacity, namely, an awareness of what othershave or have not seen. On the other hand, fellow comparative psychologists Povinelli and Vonk arguethat such experiments are undermined by a fundamental logical problem—because the ‘mind-reading’ they entail necessarily relies upon representations of behaviour, no additional explanatorypower is added by assuming that mental states are also represented. Therefore, they argue, mind-reading cannot be distinguished from mere behaviour-reading using conventional non-verbalparadigms. With both sides of this mind-reading/behaviour-reading debate afforded equal coverage,readers are left to draw their own conclusions. This section of the book concludes with a chapter byTschudin, another comparative psychologist, whose work provides tantalisingly inconclusiveevidence of false belief attribution in dolphins. Taken together, these contributions demonstratethe difficulty of assessing relatively sophisticated cognitive processes in non-verbal animals.

Accordingly, the final section comprises a series of contributions by psychologists and primatol-ogists, addressing the use of symbols by dolphins (Herman), parrots (Pepperberg) and great apes(Boysen, Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh and Fields). These fascinating reviews contain evidencethat not only does language or symbol training allow researchers to investigate capacities that aredifficult to assess unambiguously using non-verbal paradigms (e.g. mind-reading), it may alsoactually facilitate the expression of rationality (e.g. by allowing conflicting behavioural predisposi-tions to be overridden).

All in all, this volume offers a useful overview of current thinking about animal rationality from avariety of academic perspectives. It provides an invaluable point of entry for students new to the area,while also offering researchers an insight into the perspectives of those whose approaches to animalrationality are grounded in disciplines other than their own. Indeed, some of the contributors (inparticular, Allen) highlight existing cross-disciplinary scepticism and point to the potential value of amore unified approach to the study of animal cognition.

The evidence presented by the contributors suggests that other animals share with us variousaspects of rationality. As our understanding of their cognitive abilities increases, so too does our

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 21: 137–140 (2007)

DOI: 10.1002/acp

138 Book reviews

responsibility to treat non-human animals accordingly, for example by providing zoo specimens withenrichment activities that make full use of their mental capacities. Inevitably, no book devoted to thisflourishing area of research interest can hope to remain entirely up-to-date for long. Published whileRational Animals was still in press, a notable case-in-point is the much-lauded Science papercontaining unprecedented evidence of causal reasoning in rats (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, &Waldmann, 2006). For those who, following Descartes, cling to the idea that rationality is a bastionof human uniqueness, such findings are bad news indeed. Ironically, as scientific knowledge aboutanimal rationality continues to advance, subscribing to the Cartesian view itself becomes increas-ingly irrational.

REFERENCE

Blaisdell, A. P., Sawa, K., Leising, J., & Waldmann, M. R. (2006). Science, 311, 1020–1022.

ANDREW HILLThe University of Queensland, Australia

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com)

DOI: 10.1002/acp.1312

Exploring How Neurological and Cognitive Components Interact Throughout IndividualDevelopment

DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (2nd ed.). Edited by Mark H. Johnson.Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005, No. of pages 256. ISBN 1-4051-2629-9. Price £24.99 (paperback).

Mark Johnson has produced an ambitious and timely review of a wealth of evidence from the fieldsof neuroscience, clinical research and cognitive development with the aim of showing how a range ofmodern research tools can combine to further develop an integrated approach to the study ofdevelopmental cognitive neuroscience. In this second edition, the author has drawn on extensiveadditional research to that presented in the first edition and argues that a clearer understanding of theexisting evidence and modern research techniques available is necessary in order to evaluate thecurrent status and possible future directions of the field. The author presents historical and recentperspectives in the field and systematically evaluates evidence to convincingly show how anintegration of disciplines can lead to a fuller and more accurate understanding of how neurologicaland cognitive components interact throughout individual development in a range of domains.

Throughout the main body of the book three perspectives on functional brain development,namely the maturational view, a skills learning perspective and the theory of interactive specialisa-tion, are evaluated in light of evidence from biological and cognitive research. The author begins bysetting out classic and recent perspectives on core debates about the relative contribution of natureand nurture in human development. The issues concerning these positions are provided and moderntheorising is presented which suggests that to argue that certain abilities are innate is essentiallymisleading when attempting to understand the complex interplay of genetic and environmentalfactors in human cognitive development.

Evidence of pre- and post-natal brain development and regional specificity is reviewed with thebalanced conclusion outlined that some large scale cortical regions are pre-specified yet othersmaller functional areas are developed in an activity dependent way. Research exploring thedevelopment of vision, visual orienting and visual attention is clearly presented and it is arguedthat whilst binocular vision may be the result of a maturational process, an activity dependentaccount may describe the impact of two separate visual inputs on cortical development.

The author sets out a convincing case for the need for further research when discussing the domainof perception of and activity towards the physical world. It is cogently argued that there is evidencefor the operation of two subsystems dealing with analogue information and object tracking

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 21: 137–140 (2007)

DOI: 10.1002/acp

Book reviews 139