Cognitive Faculty By Species
Some animals such as dogs, horses, great apes, and (more recently) dolphins and parrots are typically thought by laymen as intelligent in ways that some other species of animal are not. For example, crows are attributed with human-like intelligence in the folklore of many cultures. A number of recent survey studies have demonstrated the consistency of these rankings between people in a given culture and indeed to a considerable extent across cultures.
A common image is the scala naturae, the ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top.
A more fruitful approach has been to recognize that different animals may have different kinds of cognitive processes, which are better understood in terms of the ways in which they are cognitively adapted to their different ecological niches, than by positing any kind of hierarchy. (See Shettleworth (1998), Reznikova (2007).)
One question that can be asked coherently is how far different species are intelligent in the same ways as humans are, i.e., are their cognitive processes similar to ours. Not surprisingly, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to do best on such an assessment. Among the birds, corvids and parrots have typically been found to perform well. Octopodes have also been shown to exhibit a number of higher-level skills such as tool use, but the amount of research on cephalopod intelligence is still limited.
Baboons have been shown to be capable of recognizing words.
Read more about this topic: Animal Cognition
Famous quotes containing the words cognitive, faculty and/or species:
“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited ‘reality’ ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)