ABSTRACT
In the introduction to their influential anthology on comparative cognition research, Wasserman and Zentall (2006: 4–5) summarize what I have called that discipline’s ‘Standard Practice’:
[Cognition is] an animal’s ability to remember the past, to choose in the present, and to plan for the future…. Unequivocal distinctions between cognition and simpler Pavlovian and instrumental learning processes … are devilishly difficult to devise…. [but] unless clear evidence is provided that a more complex process has been used, C. Lloyd Morgan’s famous canon of parsimony obliges us to assume that it has not; we must then conclude that a simpler learning process can account for the learning…. The challenge then is to identify flexible behavior that cannot be accounted for by simpler learning mechanisms. Thus, a cognitive process is one that does not merely result from the repetition of a behavior or from the repeated pairing of a stimulus with reinforcement.
Several ideas can be unpacked from this short characterization of the field. First, there is a default concern for associative explanations of behavior; associative processes must be considered as a possible explanation for any experimental data. Second, there is a default preference for “simpler” associative explanations; producing a plausible associative account of some behavior is seen as a trump card which undermines a cognitive interpretation of the results. Third, these practices are only cogent if associative and cognitive explanations of behavior are mutually exclusive alternatives.