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...
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Posted on November 30, 2007 9:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on August 17, 2007 12:53 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on June 5, 2007 8:41 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on March 14, 2007 5:03 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on February 22, 2007 3:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on February 14, 2007 9:55 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on November 7, 2006 10:34 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on September 9, 2006 9:34 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks