Animal consciousness psychology
Animal consciousness studies.
Source: Jeffrey Eisen/Pexels.
A growing number of people, including academics and non-academic folks, are very interested in what nonhuman animals (animals) are thinking and feeling.
Animal consciousness psychology
Two of my recent posts—"The Eclectic Father of Cognitive Ethology" about Donald Griffin's seminal work and an interview with Jonathan Birch titled "The Edge of Sentience: Why Drawing Lines Is So Difficult"—have generated a good number of emails asking me to say more about the study of animal minds and the field of cognitive ethology.
The interdisciplinary science of cognitive ethology is concerned with the evolution of cognitive processes.
Since behavioral abilities have evolved in response to natural selection pressures, ethologists favor observations and experiments on animals in conditions that are as close as possible to the natural environment where the selection occurred.
No longer constrained by psychological behaviorism, cognitive ethologists are interested in comparing thought processes,