Abstract: Summary In this chapter I want to stand back from the splendid empirical work on animal cognitive capacities that is the focus of this book, and look at the broader context of cognitive concerns within which the work can be viewed. Indeed even the term `cognitive ethology' currently connotes and denotes more than is represented here, as other collections of articles, such as and , exemplify. I include the current descendants of behavioristic learning theory, evolutionary epistemology, evolutionary psychology and the recent comparative turn that has been taken in cognitive science. These several approaches, despite their considerable overlap, often appear independent and even ignorant of one another. Like the proverbial blind men feeling the hide of an elephant, they touch hands from time to time, yet collectively have only a piecemeal and distributed understanding of the shape of the whole. Although each approach may indeed need the space to work out its own conceptual and methodological preoccupations without confounding interference from other views, a utopian spirit envisages an ultimate coming together, a more comprehensive realization of the synthetic approach to animal cognition that is this book's theme.

Abstract: Abstract  Relational learning, as opposed to perceptual learning, is based on the abstract properties of the stimuli. Although at present there is no doubt that pigeons are capable of relational behavior, this study aims to further disclose the conditions under which it occurs. Pigeons were trained in an outdoor cage on a matching-to-sample or an oddity-from-sample task, with colored cardboard stimuli presented horizontally. The apparatus involved three sliding lids on which the stimuli were drawn and which, when displaced, revealed the reinforcement. The lids were either adjacent to each other or somewhat separated. Training sessions involved two colors, and test sessions six different colors (same dimension test), or six different shapes (different dimension test). One group of birds trained under the “adjacent” condition failed when tested with new stimuli, but succeeded in both dimension tests after training under the “separate” condition. Two other groups of birds succeeded in all tests after training under the latter condition. These results show that depending on procedural details, pigeons are or are not able to transfer from one visual dimension to another, thus extending previous related findings.