Concept learning in animals.
By T. Zentall, E. Wasserman, O. Lazareva, R. Thompson, Mary Jo Rattermann. 2008
196 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Generally speaking, the study of concepts in cognitive psychology is anthropocentric with respect to both content and theory. A broader comparative perspective on the various forms of concept learning not only provides a more inclusive view of conceptual behavior, but it also provides a more objective perspective from which to identify underlying processes. We suggest that several of the major varieties of conceptual classes claimed to be uniquely human are also exhibited by nonhuman animals. We present evidence for the formation of several sorts of conceptual stimulus classes by nonhuman animals: perceptual classes involving classification according to the shared attributes of objects, associative classes or functional equivalences in which stimuli form a class based on common associations, relational classes, in which the conceptual relationship between or among stimuli defines the class, and relations between relations, in which the conceptual (analogical) relationship is defined by the relation between classes of stimuli. We conclude that not only are nonhuman animals capable of acquiring a wide variety of concepts, but that the underlying processes that determine concept learning are also likely to be quite similar.
Subfields: Cell Biology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/681e8f5bafad339e0fb9ee33362fd45afb37d6bf
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In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Concept formation in American black bears, Ursus americanus (2012, background): “…can be presented along a continuum of abstraction where more abstract discriminations must be made on the basis of inferring a relationship among the exemplars beyond shared perceptual features (Roberts & Mazmanian 1988; Vonk & MacDonald 2002, 2004; Zentall et al. 2008; Fize et al. 2011).”