Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
The lovely banners were created by Anton Oetll and Todd Hartman.
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
The Mixing Memory Reading Group is a place for experts and non-experts alike to discuss books and papers in cognitive science.
Category: Comparative Psychology
Got your attention, right? That's the title of a paper by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli in April's Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Well, the full title is "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds." Here's the abstract: Over...
Posted by Chris at 6:46 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
I've been busy as hell, so I haven't had much time or energy to post anything lately. But I had an idea today that I thought I'd try out. There are a bunch of experiments that I really like for...
Posted by Chris at 9:42 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
Crows are smart. Really smart. But just how smart are they? Studying non-human primates, particularly gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, researchers have shown that they're capable of what's called meta-tool use, or using one tool with another tool (I've mostly seen...
Posted by Chris at 12:53 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
Over the last couple decades there's been a pretty heated debate about which, if any, nonhuman animals possess a "theory of mind," that is, the ability to think about what others are thinking. Much of the research bearing on...
Posted by Chris at 8:41 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Cognitive Psychology
I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the...
Posted by Chris at 5:03 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
In a comment to the last post, "Korax" mentions a paper published online in Current Biology this week on chimpanzee tool use. The tool use described in this paper is, as far as I can tell, as or more complex...
Posted by Chris at 3:30 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
You've probably already come across this story, but just in case: Oldest chimp tools found in West Africa Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years. In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools...
Posted by Chris at 9:55 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
By now you've probably all heard about the paper published by Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late October titled "Self-recognition in an Asian elephant." I suspect that for people who...
Posted by Chris at 10:34 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Comparative Psychology
Over the years I'd heard that, lurking in the basements of psychology departments at various universities throughout the world, there are psychologists studying music cognition, but until the publication of a special issue of the journal Cognition, I hadn't really...
Posted by Chris at 9:34 AM • 5 Comments •
