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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1994, 47B (3) 349-352
Book Reviews
Griffin, D.R. (1992). Animal minds. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press. Pp. 310. ISBN 0-226-30863-4. £19.95 (Hbk).
Griffin notes in the preface that there is considerable overlap between this work
and his two previous books on the same subject (1981; 1984), and anyone familiar
with these will be well prepared for what he has to say in this one. For anyone
else, Griffin's theme can be summarized by saying that he is an advocate of an
extreme version of what is now called "cognitive ethology", which in its more
moderate forms is the interpretation of the natural behaviours of animal species
in terms of inferred cognitive and information-processing capacities. He is extreme
in two different ways.
First, he is explicitly not satisfied with explanations that appeal to complicated
decision-making algorithms, types of stimulus representation, memory mechanisms, and so on without a commitment to mental processes of the kinds available
to informal human introspection. Second, I know of no other author currently in
print who draws such a fine line between cognitive explanations of vertebrate and
invertebrate behaviour. In this volume the line appears to be drawn only at the
stage of re-constructing an animal's internal stream of consciousness. Thus in
Griffin (1984) we were told that weaver ants might think to themselves, "'Those
larvae put out sticky stuff that would help hold these leaves together'" (p. 107),
but here "When leaves have been bent into approximately an appropriate shape
workers might consciously realize that it is now necessary to glue them together
and fetch larvae of a suitable age to secrete the necessary silk" (1992; p. 76).
Examples of vertebrate subjective declarations used earlier were, '"If I dive into
my burrow, that creature won't hurt me' . . . 'If I peck at that bright spot, I can
get grain', . . . 'If I press the lever, the floor won't hurt my feet'" (1984; p. 137).
These phrases are repeated verbatim in the present work (p. 122); but a more
elaborate example is constructed to deal with intermittent reinforcement in the
Skinner box. "In this situation the hungry pigeon might think something like:
'Pecking that bright spot sometimes gives me food, but not always. It's easy—
almost like picking up seeds—so I'll keep trying until every now and then that box
clanks and I can get some food'" (1992; p. 125).
There are not all that many more instances of Griffin actually putting words
into animals' beaks and mouth-parts, and the fact that any are included at all is
helpful in confirming that he really does mean what he says about human and
animal subjective experiences having much in common. But there is more involved
in his work than just this sort of bizarre speculation. The present book is divided
into reviews of three categories of evidence for animal cognition. Five chapters
cover the adaptability of behaviour to novel challenges: these deal with foraging
for food; predation and predator avoidance; the construction of artifacts (including
a long section on beavers); tool using; and concept formation (emphasizing visual
categorization experiments with pigeons). A single chapter examines brain mechanisms of cognition (evidence for hemispheric lateralization in vertebrates and
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BOOK REVIEWS
event-related potentials in mammals), and four chapters review animal communication from the waggle-dance of honey bees to the productive and receptive use of
artificial gesture systems in chimpanzees and dolphins.
It is possible to compliment Griffin on the range of species and kinds of
behaviour he describes, and on the thoroughness of his scholarship. The bibliography is very extensive and includes many references to sources in which alternative interpretations of the data are given. However, the book is still in the form
of a manifesto rather than a systematic review. I was reminded that Thorpe (1963)
used the construction and repair of their cases by caddis fly larvae as an example
of behavioural adaptability, and also referred to the flexibility of Honey Guides
(an African wax-eating bird that guides ratels, baboons, or humans to bees' nests,
depending on the availability and willingness of these ally species to co-operate)
in the context of a fairly liberal interpretation of choice within species-specific bird
behaviours. But between these two points, Thorpe reviewed learning and instinct
across the entire animal kingdom, whereas Griffin tends to be very selective in
picking interesting vertebrates and arthropods—no internal monologues or
versatile behaviours are given for amphibians or reptiles, and Aplysia is also notable
by its absence.
However, as the crux of Griffin's argument is the similarity between human and
non-human subjective experience, perhaps the biggest gap in his books is reference
to and analysis of theories and evidence in areas of human psychology that would
weaken his case. Philosophers get a fair crack of the whip, and one of the strengths
of Animal minds is the wide reference to (and generous quotations from) sources
in which they have argued for positions diametrically opposed to Griffin's. But
there is nothing on what psychologists might say about the role of self-instruction
in determining human adaptability and how far something similar could conceivably apply to other species. It is a safe bet that psycholinguists would disagree
violently with the assertion that "the versatility of animal communication makes
the distinction between animal communication and human language a less crucial
criterion of human uniqueness" (p. 22). More general theories of human cognition
are still divided between nativists (most recently evolutionary psychologists who
propose that human thought processes reflect species-specific adaptations to the
co-operative hunter-gatherer niche in the Pleistocene) and environmentalists of
various persuasions who would link human mental experience to social construction
or internalization of culturally determined discourses. Both camps would presumably be united in denying that there is much to be gained from stream-of-consciousness interpretations of dam-building beavers or courting bower birds, to say nothing
of pike-fleeing minnows, bluffing mantis shrimps, or architecturally adept caddis-fly
larvae.
Leaving aside this issue, at a more behavioural level the evidence reviewed by
Griffin could be interpreted as supporting the widespread importance of responseoutcome associations in natural behaviours, in both learned and unlearned forms.
This generalization would not necessarily prompt useful further work, but it
occurred to me while reading Griffin's account of it that the experiment by
Tinkelpaugh (1928) has an unusually high ratio of citations to replications. And
the strategy of seeking limited and small-scale analogies between animal and human
cognition is not necessarily futile if traditional cautions with regard to objective
measurement are adhered to. An example that Griffin did not include concerns
various phenomena in human visual search that have been interpreted in terms
of mechanisms of visual attention (Treisman & Sato, 1990). Some of these can
be replicated by measuring reaction times in pigeons (e.g. Blough, D.S., 1993;
Blough, P.M., 1989; Cook, 1992). It is arguable that this means somethine in
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relation to immediate visual awareness, or at least the adaptive functions of visual
systems, but I suspect that this is not the sort of result that Griffin would find
helpful to his cause.
S.F. WALKER
REFERENCES
Blough, D.S. (1993). Effects on search speed of the probability of target-distractor combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 19, 231-243.
Blough, P.M. (1989). Attentional priming and visual search in pigeons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 15, 358-365.
Cook, R.G. (1992). Dimensional organization and texture discrimination in pigeons. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 18, 354-363.
Griffin, D.R. (1981). The question of animal awareness (2nd ed.). New York: Rockefeller
University Press.
Griffin, D.R. (1984). Animal thinking. London: Harvard University Press.
Thorpe, W.H. (1963). Learning and instinct in animals (2nd ed.). London: Methuen.
Treisman, A.M., & Sato, S. (1990). Conjunction search revisited. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 459-478.
Tinkelpaugh, O.L. (1928). An experimental study of representative factors in monkeys.
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 8, 197-236.
Martin, P., & Bateson, P. (1993). Measuring behaviour: An introductory
guide (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xvi + 222.
ISBN 0-521-^4614-7. £9.95 (Pbk.).
Measuring behaviour is a guide to the principles and methods of quantitative studies
of behaviour, with an emphasis on techniques of direct recording and analysis. It
is aimed primarily at undergraduate students in biology, psychology, and other
disciplines concerned with observation and measurement of animal and human
behaviour. Originally published in 1986, the appearance of a second edition is
proof of the warm welcome this book received in the scientific community. The
key to its success, no doubt, had much to do with the need for a book of this type.
Over the last three decades, studies in the behavioural sciences have undergone a
fast shift in emphasis from qualitative to quantitative analysis. Spearheaded by
researchers in psychology in North America, the importance of statistics and experimental design is now generally appreciated, and the sophistication of recording
techniques and data analysis has increased greatly. These changes have been
paralleled by technical improvements in electronic devices and the ever-increasing
availability of affordable computers. This changing approach to research has had
a spill-over effect on university teaching, first at the graduate and soon after at the
undergraduate level. It created a niche for a guide that provided an efficient introduction to the methods and skills needed to carry out behavioural research.
Measuring behaviour fills this niche very well.
I have used the book for several years as required reading in my undergaduate
animal behaviour laboratory class. It is well written, using simple language. Overload of information has been avoided, and the authors restrict themselves admirably
to the main points. The common mistakes and pitfalls that one encounters while
teaching an introductory laboratory course are almost invariably addressed and