Willard Stanton Small (1870-1943): The man who made the maze.

Willard Stanton Small (1870-1943) was among the earliest scientists to perform psychological research with rats and conducted the first experiment with a rat in a maze. This article represents the first biography devoted to Small and provides highlights from his childhood, undergraduate and graduate work, personal life, and professional career. Special attention is given to the events that led to the first rat maze experiment, which Small performed as a graduate student at Clark University. A detailed analysis of Small's published report of the maze experiment is also provided. His employment history after graduate school is discussed and includes teaching and administrative roles at multiple academic institutions, in addition to his role as a field investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Education. It is shown that Small's work impacted not only comparative psychology, but also U.S. public health, school hygiene, and education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Notes from the archives: Margaret Floy Washburn and her cats.

Margaret Floy Washburn was one of the leading psychologists of her generation, whose most important work was The Animal Mind (Goodman, 1980). As E. G. Boring noted, that text "reflected her own love of animals and her intense interest in their behavior" (1971, p. 547). What about the role of animals in Washburn's personal life? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Advancing social behavioral neuroscience by integrating ethology and comparative psychology methods through machine learning.

Social behavior is naturally occurring in vertebrate species, which holds a strong evolutionary component and is crucial for the normal development and survival of individuals throughout life. Behavioral neuroscience has seen different influential methods for social behavioral phenotyping. The ethological research approach has extensively investigated social behavior in natural habitats, while the comparative psychology approach was developed utilizing standardized and univariate social behavioral tests. The development of advanced and precise tracking tools, together with post-tracking analysis packages, has recently enabled a novel behavioral phenotyping method, that includes the strengths of both approaches. The implementation of such methods will be beneficial for fundamental social behavioral research but will also enable an increased understanding of the influences of many different factors that can influence social behavior, such as stress exposure. Furthermore, future research will increase the number of data modalities, such as sensory, physiological, and neuronal activity data, and will thereby significantly enhance our understanding of the biological basis of social behavior and guide intervention strategies for behavioral abnormalities in psychiatric disorders.

The cognitive map debate in insects: A historical perspective on what is at stake.

Though well established in mammals, the cognitive map hypothesis has engendered a decades-long, ongoing debate in insect navigation studies involving many of the field's most prominent researchers. In this paper, I situate the debate within the broader context of 20th century animal behavior research and argue that the debate persists because competing research groups are guided by different constellations of epistemic aims, theoretical commitments, preferred animal subjects, and investigative practices. The expanded history of the cognitive map provided in this paper shows that more is at stake in the cognitive map debate than the truth value of propositions characterizing insect cognition. What is at stake is the future direction of an extraordinarily productive tradition of insect navigation research stretching back to Karl von Frisch. Disciplinary labels like ethology, comparative psychology, and behaviorism became less relevant at the turn of the 21st century, but as I show, the different ways of knowing animals associated with these disciplines continue to motivate debates about animal cognition. This examination of scientific disagreement surrounding the cognitive map hypothesis also has significant consequences for philosophers' use of cognitive map research as a case study.

After 150 years of watching: is there a need for synthetic ethology?

The Darwinian idea of mental continuity is about 150 years old. Although nobody has strongly denied this evolutionary link, both conceptually and practically, relative slow advance has been made by ethology and comparative psychology to quantify mental evolution. Debates on the mechanistic interpretation of cognition often struggle with the same old issues (e.g., associationism vs cognitivism), and in general, experimental methods have made also relative slow progress since the introduction of the puzzle box. In this paper, we illustrate the prevailing issues using examples on 'mental state attribution' and 'perspective taking" and argue that the situation could be improved by the introduction of novel methodological inventions and insights. We suggest that focusing on problem-solving skills and constructing artificial agents that aim to correspond and interact with biological ones, may help to understand the functioning of the mind. We urge the establishment of a novel approach, synthetic ethology, in which researchers take on a practical stance and construct artificial embodied minds relying of specific computational architectures the performance of which can be compared directly to biological agents.

100 years of comparative psychology advancing practice, policy, and the public-And what the future requires.

This year marks the 100th anniversary since the inception of the original Journal of Comparative Psychology. This review highlights the evolution of Journal of Comparative Psychology and the field of comparative psychology over the past century through the lens of the field's contributions in the realms of science practice, science policy, and public opinion. The review culminates with a look ahead to the next 100 years, with both challenges that are likely to remain as well as potential paths to continue growth and success. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Behavioral and hormonal changes following social instability in young rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Social instability (SI) occurs when there is competition over social status. Reduced certainty of social status can lead to heightened aggression, which can increase physiological stress responses as individuals prepare to fight for their social status. However, adults can use proactive coping mechanisms to reduce the physiological stress induced by SI, such as increasing affiliation. Very little is known, however, about the behavioral and hormonal effects of SI early in development. Filling these gaps in knowledge would add to the fields of primatology and developmental and comparative psychology. We conducted an opportunistic study of a peer group of 18 rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) yearlings before and during SI. We used social network analysis to measure individuals' dominance certainty (DC; in their aggressive and submissive network) and their position in affiliative networks (grooming and play) and analyzed hair cortisol concentrations (HCCs). As predicted, during SI, we observed a decrease in DC, indicating that individuals had less stable dominance positions. As well, during SI, we observed increased rates of social grooming and decreased rates of social play, reflecting potential coping mechanisms. More socially connected individuals in social grooming and social play networks received higher levels of coalitionary support. Contrary to predictions, DC did not predict HCCs; rather, individuals that were more connected in the social play network exhibited smaller increases in HCCs during SI, revealing a potential buffering effect of social play. Our results underscore the need for further research on the effects of SI during ontogeny. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Looking back to look forward: Avenues into the field of comparative psychology.

In a reflection of my academic career thus far, I review the various aspects of my undergraduate and graduate training experiences that were pivotal in establishing myself as a doctoral candidate in comparative psychology. Key components of my undergraduate training consisted of influential faculty members, firsthand research experience, and inspiring course work across a variety of subjects. Key components of my graduate training consist of a well-suited graduate program and various leadership opportunities. I also discuss the importance of attending conferences, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. It is my hope that by highlighting these experiences future students in comparative psychology will have a greater understanding of potential avenues into this field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Doing reliable research in comparative psychology: Challenges and proposals for improvement.

Unlike some other areas of psychology that have experienced a "reproducibility crisis," the extent to which research findings in comparative psychology are reliable is only just beginning to come under the spotlight. I outline what is known about where we as a field stand in terms of the reliability of our findings and highlight some characteristic features of our research that give may cause for concern, focusing primarily on experimental comparative cognition. I then discuss ways that we as individual researchers and a wider community can take steps to improve our current practices (and in some cases already are) and highlight the crucial role institutions and gatekeepers have to play in effecting change. By tackling potential issues head on, the field of comparative psychology can have more confidence that our research findings and the resultant claims we make about animal behavior and cognition are reliable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How comparative was (is) the Journal of Comparative Psychology? A reptilian perspective.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 135(3) of Journal of Comparative Psychology (see record 2021-87304-004). In the article "How Comparative Was (Is) the Journal of Comparative Psychology? A Reptilian Perspective" by Gordon M. Burghardt (Journal of Comparative Psychology. Advance online publication. August 5, 2021. http://doi.org/10.1037/com0000290), the phrase in the introduction that includes the Dewbury (1998) citation also includes an extra word. The phrase should appear as Dewbury (1998) noted that the focus. The year of publication for the Journal of Animal Behavior that appears in the third line of the Method section should appear as (1911-1917). The last sentence in the first paragraph of the Method section should appear as The 8,911 entries over this 110-year period constituted the data analyzed here in detail. The first sentence of the Results section should appear as The Journal of Animal Behavior published 238 articles in its 7-year run. The last phrase of the first paragraph of the Results section should appear as and 8,635 published items of the JCP and JCPP....] Comparative psychology, and particularly the Journal of Comparative Psychology, has been criticized for a lack of taxon diversity. The nature and consequences of the critiques are discussed and assessed by analyzing the representation of nonavian reptiles in the journal over its 100-year existence. Although reptiles are indeed rare in the journal, their representation has greatly increased in recent decades, and especially since about 1980. More interestingly, the mix among the major reptilian groups: turtles, lizards, snakes, and crocodylians, has shifted. First turtles predominated in studies, but in recent decades, snakes were far more prominent. In the last 50 years of the journal, there were 10 times the number of articles on snakes than in the first 50 years, turtles declined, and lizards increased greatly, although their totals remained less than half the number of snake articles. Crocodylians only appeared in the first several volumes in the 1920s and never again. The predominance of snakes, not known for their cognitive prowess, in a journal viewed increasingly as an outlet for work on comparative cognition, is discussed. Finally, it appears that the low representation of reptile behavioral research is not peculiar to the Journal of Comparative Psychology, but animal behavior journals more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Zing-Yang Kuo and "Giving up instincts in psychology", 100 years later.

A hundred years ago, the Journal of Comparative Psychology began being published and currently stands as the longest-running science journal devoted to the study of animal behavior. In that same year, 1921, a paper was published in the Journal of Philosophy that was foundational to our field of study-"Giving up Instincts in Psychology" by Zing-Yang Kuo. This brief essay discusses some of the main arguments of Kuo's article and how they have extended into today's thinking and empirical work on behavioral development. The essay emphasizes his ideas about the need to study neophenotypes to understand the range of behavioral possibilities and to assess nonobvious sources of experience in the development of species-typical behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The journey in comparative psychology matters more than the destination.

The Journal of Comparative Psychology has enjoyed a century of publishing some of the best investigations of animal behavior, often with reference to human cognition and behavior. This long history has manifested many paradigm-like shifts. Researchers have fluctuated between treating animals as models of human learning to emphasizing stark differences between animal and human behavior to stressing psychological continuity across species. At this time, there appears little consensus regarding questions of psychological continuity. I argue that this is a futile debate. Rather than focusing on behavior in nonhuman animals that represent potential parallels to human psychology (or behavior), comparative psychologists should focus on questions of development, function, and mechanism of behavior to better understand the behavior of all species in biological context. A focus on understanding underlying mechanisms for behavior rather than settling on behavioral outcomes alone as diagnostic of a species' status on some imaginary scale of progress will help address anthropocentric biases in current approaches. A focus on the "why" and "how" questions espoused by Tinbergen over half a century ago will move the field in better alignment with related fields, such as ethology, and provide greater insights into both animal and human minds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Pigeons acquire the 1-back task: Implications for implicit versus explicit learning?

In humans, a distinction can be made between implicit or procedural learning (involving stimulus-response associations) and explicit or declarative learning (involving verbalizable rules) that is relatively easy to make in verbal humans. According to several investigators, it is also possible to make such a distinction in nonverbal animals. One way is by training them on a conditional discrimination task (e.g., matching-to-sample) in which reinforcement for correct choice on the current trial is delayed until after a choice is made on the next trial - a method known as the 1-back procedure. According to Smith, Jackson, and Church ( Journal of Comparative Psychology, 134(4), 423-434, 2020), the delay between the sample-correct-comparison response on one trial and reinforcement obtained on the next trial is too long for implicit (associative) learning. Thus, according to this theory, learning must be explicit. In the present experiments we trained pigeons using the 1-back procedure. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained on red/green 1-back matching using a non-correction procedure. Some of the pigeons showed significant learning. When a correction procedure was introduced, all the pigeons showed evidence of learning. In Experiment 2, new pigeons learned red/green 1-back matching with the correction procedure. In Experiment 3, new pigeons learned symbolic 1-back matching with yellow and blue conditional stimuli and red/green choice stimuli. Thus, pigeons can learn using 1-back reinforcement. Although it would appear that the pigeons acquired this task explicitly, we believe that this procedure does not adequately distinguish between implicit and explicit learning.

One hundred years of the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

The year 2021 marks the 100th year of publication of the Journal of Comparative Psychology by the American Psychological Association. To mark the centennial of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, a series of essays by diverse authors will appear in the four issues of Volume 135. Some of them concern the history of the journal, key figures in its history, and of the discipline; others concern the discipline's current status and its likely near future (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Comparative psychology's founding mother, Margaret Floy Washburn.

A scientific discipline grows through the insights and labors of individual scientists, honed by their discussions among colleagues and the mentoring they provide to the next generation of scientists. Margaret Floy Washburn, president of the American Psychological Association in 1921, the founding year of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, was a large presence during the early years of comparative psychology. She was a consummate scientist in all the abovementioned dimensions: insights, labors, communicating with her peers (including, a century later, readers of her voluminous writings), and mentoring. This essay provides an overview of her professional life and, more importantly, a synopsis of her major theoretical work, Movement and Mental Imagery, published in 1916. Her theoretical insights are remarkably relevant to contemporary developments in comparative psychology and related subdisciplines in psychology. She is an admirable founding mother for the discipline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A century of the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

The Journal of Comparative Psychology, the oldest continuously published journal on animal behavior, has reached its centennial year. I examined each article published in the Journal over the past 100 years to document the changing roles of women and of international authors over the past century. The analysis also documented changes in the range of species and topics studied over the Journal's history. The Journal published the greatest number of articles in 1969, but as new journals appeared that focused on animal learning and behavioral neuroscience, the number of articles published decreased. In the past 35 years, since these other journals appeared, there has been a steady increase in the proportion of female authors and of authors working from outside North America. At the same time, the diversity of species and topics studied has increased. As a result, the Journal today is very different than it was 100 years ago. Comparative psychology appears to be thriving better in Europe and Asia than in North America, so maintaining a diversity of taxa studied and an international authorship and readership will be critical for the Journal's continued vitality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Comparative cognition: Perspectives, challenges, and prospects.

The publication of the centennial year of the Journal of Comparative Psychology is an occasion to reflect on the state of our discipline. In this article, I focus on one aspect of comparative psychology, namely, comparative cognition. This focus stems from my long-standing interest in comparative cognition. The trends and challenges in comparative cognition share many of the trends and challenges in the broader field of comparative psychology. In the first part of this article, I outline my perspective on the field. Next, I consider challenges. I end with a section on prospects for the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

(Re)claiming plants in comparative psychology.

Up until the middle of the 19th century, some data about plant behavior could be found in books dealing with comparative psychology. The tendency gradually faded away, and the topic was almost exclusively treated in literature dealing with plant physiology. In recent years, however, there has been a revamping of psychological terminology and theorizing to describe, explain, and formulate hypotheses on the evidence that many of the sophisticated behaviors plants exhibit are an expression of cognitive competences that are generally attributed to human and nonhuman animals. In this work I shall discuss a selection of experimental studies supporting the idea that plants could be defined as cognitive agents. Experiments showing that the behavior of plants is controlled by a representation of its goal, episodic-like memory, and decision-making will be described. It is not, however, my intention to embrace any position as to whether or to what degree plants are conscious. Rather, I hope to (re)fuel the discussion within the psychological community that will point in the direction of integrating studies concerning adaptive plant behavior within the wider field of comparative psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing consistency in children's and monkeys' performance across computerized and manual detour problem tasks.

The detour test is a widely used test in comparative psychology that assesses various cognitive abilities, including inhibitory control. The goal of this study was to assess the degree of consistency in the performance of human children and capuchin monkeys on a manual detour test and on a computerized equivalent. Because computerized testing is more common in comparative research, it is important to determine whether a computerized version of the detour problem can provide measures of general inhibition that align with measures obtained from the same subjects when given a manual version. We found that human children and capuchin monkeys approached both tasks very differently and also that there was no correlation between the manual and the computerized task within each species. This suggests caution is needed when considering one format or the other when the goal is to use a single task to provide a general measure of inhibitory control.

The comparative analysis of intelligence.

The study of intelligence in humans has been ongoing for over 100 years, including the underlying structure, predictive validity, related cognitive measures, and source of differences. One of the key findings in intelligence research is the uniform positive correlations among cognitive tasks. This has been replicated with every cognitive test battery in humans. Nevertheless, many other aspects of intelligence research have revealed contradictory lines of evidence. Recently, cognitive test batteries have been developed for animals to examine similarities to humans in cognitive structure. The results are inconsistent, but there is evidence for some similarities. This article reviews the way intelligence and related cognitive abilities are assessed in humans and animals and suggests a different way of devising test batteries for maximizing between-species comparisons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).