The first volume has been published: Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition by Sara Shettleworth and if it’s any indication of the quality of future volumes, Oxford has done very well indeed.
In a mere 124 pages Shettleworth offers the reader a good (though necessarily hurried) look at comparative cognition: the field that asks what humans have in common with other creatures regarding how they think, and what makes humans unique?
Another example: because animals have different abilities than we, humans may be insensitive to how they experience a problem. For example, because the visual systems of some birds and honeybees extend into the ultraviolet range, a scientist looking a brightly colored flower or plumage may mistake what a bird or bee responds to.
Another key principle that has frustrated many an undergraduate is Lloyd Morgan’s Cannon: boiled down, it means that one shouldn’t interpret animal behavior as reflecting more sophisticated cognition if simpler cognition will do. It’s natural to interpret an animal behavior as reflecting cognitive processes humans would invoke in that situation. The animal may be doing what humans do, but for very different reasons or different methods.
Most often, this “other mechanism” is simple association. Time and time again, Shettleworth points out that what looks like sophisticated communication, say, or empathy, is explainable by the operation of relatively simple associative models, and that more work is actually needed to persuade us that the claimed cognitive process is actually at work. Such reading leads to momentary frustration, but ultimate admiration for the care of the scientists.
So how exactly are species different than humans? First, I should repeat that species are all different from one another, and so the question that might interest us (as it interested Darwin) is whether humans are in any way unique? Shettleworth closes with a review of a few proposed answers—e.g., Mike Tomasello’s suggestion that humans alone cooperatively share intentions—but ultimately casts her vote with none.
This is a wonderful book for a reader with a bit of background in psychology, but make no mistake, it’s not popular reading. Shettleworth sets out to review the field, not to offer choice bits to tempt a reader who was not otherwise interested.
Should educators read this book? Direct applications to educational practice are unlikely to spring to mind, but educators who, as part of their practice, are deeply immersed in understanding human cognition and development will likely find it of value.