404 Forum
9 September 2001
Book Review
Do animals know that
they know?
Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to
Consciousness
by Donald R. Griffin, University of Chicago
Press, 2001. $27.50/£17.50 (xvi + 356 pages)
ISBN 0 226 30865 0
A quarter of a
century ago,
Donald Griffin first
raised the flag for
the scientific study
of animal
consciousness in
the book1 of which
this is essentially
the fifth edition.
Although expanded and updated, its
essential message remains: scientists not
only should take seriously the possibility
that non-human animals are conscious
in some sense but they should try to
understand the nature of that
consciousness. Observations of behavioral
complexity, flexible adjustment to novelty,
and studies of natural and laboratory
trained communication are enthusiastically
described in order to persuade readers
that at least some animals, some of the
time, are not only perceptually aware but
consciously think about what they are
doing. Beavers repairing their dams and
bowerbirds choosing decorations for their
bowers appear in company with the usual
pigeon, parrot, bee and chimpanzee
subjects of studies on animal counting,
communication, and other forms of
problem-solving. Notwithstanding the
fact that animal counting, communication
and problem-solving are usually studied
without any commitment to the nature of
the animals’ private experiences, as
reviewed in other recent books2–4, Griffin is
as ready to infer conscious thinking from
them as from the wealth of ethological
observations he so vividly recounts.
Long before he began writing about
animal consciousness, Griffin was well
known for his studies of echolocation in
bats. Indeed it is tempting to see a
connection between his success at
elucidating one mechanism of animal
behavior invisible (and inaudible) to
humans and his willingness to tackle
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another, not to mention that bats have
become an icon for the mysteries of non-
human consciousness5. This volume is
expanded from Griffin’s previous books on
the same subject, largely in the chapters
given to spirited rebuttals of his critics and
to up-to-the-minute discussions of new
material from neuroscience and philosophy
(other sections, such as that on animal tool
use, could have done with more updating).
Nearly every field related to the study of
animal minds has developed almost beyond
recognition since his first book in 1976 (as
can be seen in Refs 2–4). The contemporary
study of comparative cognition was just
getting off the ground then, as
behavioristically trained psychologists
began testing memory and other cognitive
processes in rats and pigeons. In ethology,
rigorous field experiments had barely begun
to reveal what understanding underlies
animal communication. Meanwhile, in
cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the
study of human consciousness has become
more than respectable, whilst also
sparking new dialogues with philosophers.
These developments occurred largely
independently of Griffin’s writings, but all
provide rich grist for his mill.
When a beaver repairs its dam in a
surprising and novel way, Griffin urges us to
entertain the possibility that it is consciously
thinking about its predicament and deciding
what to do. That may be so, but in order to
be sure, a causal role for conscious
thinking must be specified in a way that
allows the behavior of a conscious beaver
to be distinguished from that of a
non-conscious one. Better yet, the
evolution of consciousness would be more
comprehensible if consciousness could be
seen to increase fitness. Griffin
characterizes some of his critics – including
myself 3 – as ‘paralytic perfectionists’
(p. 32), claiming that we demand such an
unreasonably high standard of proof for
any sort of animal consciousness that we
cannot study it at all. But the paralytic
perfectionists have an important role in
proposing testable alternatives to all-too-
ready invocations of conscious thought or
any other anthropomorphic mechanism to
explain behavior. It can take a leap of
imagination to grasp that creatures that
might look and behave very much like us
do not also think like us, but very often
those willing to make that leap have found
the evidence in their favor. For example,
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until a behaviorist skeptic pointed to
specific cues the animals could have used,
early tests of ‘theory of mind’in chimpanzees
were interpreted as showing that the chimps
could tell what a human experimenter knew.
With better controlled experiments, the
chimpanzees no longer behaved as if they
understood humans’minds. Similarly, clever
tests of tool-using monkeys have revealed
surprising gaps in their understanding3.
Unfortunately for the comparative
study of consciousness, most empirical
studies of human consciousness rely at
some point on what subjects say about
their mental states. Indeed, some authors
have suggested that only members of the
one species with language might be
conscious4. Nevertheless, the current
enthusiasm for the study of human
consciousness, together with the
importance of animal research to
advances in neuroscience, has stimulated
a growing number of attempts to define
behavior in animals that is functionally
similar to human behavior associated
with verbal reports of particular kinds of
awareness. Prime examples are studies
of episodic-like memory in scrub jays6
and a recent demonstration that rhesus
macaques know when they remember7.
The jays and monkeys in those
experiments could increase their reward
rates if they had access to processes that
in humans are characterized by
distinctive conscious experiences.
Whether such tests do capture the same
processes in non-humans can be debated,
but whether or not one can go beyond
functionally similar behaviors to similar
mental experiences seems unresolvable at
present7,8. And more accurately specifying
the neural correlates of consciousness –
a topic whose relevance to this enterprise
does not escape Griffin – might not even be
helpful when it comes to animals with
very different nervous systems, like the
insects frequently mentioned in this book.
Regardless of where one stands, devising
non-verbal tests for specific mental
processes in animals is a major challenge
for those studying the evolutionary and
neural basis of any aspect of cognition,
consciousness included. For them and for
the general scientific reader, Griffin’s
latest book is a sometimes infuriating, not
always sufficiently critical, but always
stimulating summary of one person’s
perspective on the current state of play.
 Forum
Sara J. Shettleworth
Dept of Psychology, University of Toronto,
100 St George Street, Room 4020, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3.
e-mail: shettle@psych.utoronto.ca
References
1 Griffin, D.R. (1976) The Question of Animal
Awareness, Rockefeller University Press
2 Hauser, M.D. (2000) Wild Minds: What Animals
Really Think, Henry Holt & Co.
3 Shettleworth, S.J. (1998) Cognition, Evolution,
and Behavior, Oxford University Press
4 Macphail, E.M. (1998) The Evolution of
Consciousness, Oxford University Press
5 Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat?
Philos. Rev. 83, 435–450
6 Griffiths, D. et al. (1999) Episodic memory:
what can animals remember about their past?
Trends Cognit. Sci. 3, 74–80
7 Hampton, R.R. (2001) Rhesus monkeys know
when they remember. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
U. S. A. 98, 5359–5362
8 Griffin, D.R. (2001) Animals know more than we used
to think. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 98, 4833–4834
Representing high-level
cognitive processes
Complex Cognition: The Psychology of
Human Thought
by Robert Sternberg and Talia Ben-Zeev,
Oxford University Press, 2001. £25.99
(xi + 450 pages) ISBN 0 19 510771 3
It may be a truism,
but the first thing
that strikes you
about this book is
its title. Complex
cognition: well, it
certainly is these
days. It made me
look back to my
own introduction to
psychology, some time ago. The psychology
that the beginning student encountered in
1971, if my college was typical, was still
dominated by behaviourism: ‘psychology is
the scientific study of human and animal
behaviour’, we learned (effectively, as you can
see). I can also recall the frisson that rippled
around the room when my friend Julian,
on being asked by the tutor to reproduce
the definition, used the word ‘mind’.
And cognitive psychology? That meant
the two urtexts: Neisser’s Cognitive
Psychology (1967) and Broadbent’s
Perception and Communication (1958);
Gregory’s Eye and Brain (1968) was new too,
just preparing us for the idea that perception
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TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.9 September 2001
was part of cognition. No-one had heard
of cognitive science. We were steeped in
information theory, signal detection,
psychophysics, backward masking, iconic
memory, the magical number seven. The
stratigraphy of the textbooks of the time is
very interesting. For a few years, there was
a set of slim paperbacks covering particular
areas in not very great detail; the earliest
general cognitive psychology textbook on
my shelf is Lindsay and Norman’s Human
Information Processing (1977), still, for my
money, among the best there’s ever been.
After these came the deluge, of course,
and the cognitive psychology we teach today
is richer, more interesting and more easily
connectible with the world outside the lab
and the classroom; indeed, the ‘real world’is
the lab for an increasing range of research,
in a way unimaginable a generation ago.
No-one could now list all the books that
have the words ‘cognitive psychology’ or
‘cognition’ in their titles. Cognition is, for
sure, a very complex business now, and
the challenge of communicating it to a
contemporary clientele is daunting.
Complex cognition: the authors don’t
mean it to sound daunting, obviously. But
they do mean to reflect the field’s expanded
range by forgoing both of the traditional
ways of compiling textbooks. The first is
the Lindsay and Norman way: to attempt a
survey of the whole field, as is done today
by, for instance, Eysenck and Keane1. The
alternative is to confine the text to a more
detailed account of a readily circumscribed
area: the psychology of memory, or language,
or thinking and reasoning. Sternberg and
Ben-Zeev carve at a joint that Wundt would
have recognized: where ‘high-level’cognitive
processes – the ones he shrunk from
studying – begin. Thus, ‘Complex
cognition deals with how people mentally
represent and think about…information’
(p. 1). They therefore eschew perception,
attention, memory even, although they do
deal with knowledge; they also look at
thinking, language, intelligence, and
learning and teaching. Do they succeed?
These authors are eminently suited to
the task they set themselves: few have
been as productive as has Sternberg.
There are in excess of 20 books in the
reference list with his name on them, and
he is referenced in all the major sections
just mentioned. He is probably best known
for his work on intelligence, having been a
leading figure in developing a cognitive
approach to the problem. Hence the
appearance of that topic in this book, and it
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405
is to be welcomed: many cognitive texts deal
with expertise or creativity, but this one
links them to intelligence, and intelligence
to the mainstream of cognition – and does
so most effectively. It is the strongest part
of the book. The sections on intelligence are
not the only distinctive aspect of it, though:
there is also an emphasis on development,
teaching and learning. This is welcome too,
and again reflects the research expertise
of the two authors. Apart from these
sections, the rest overlaps with what one
can find in a more conventional text, such
as Eysenck and Keane’s.
But I’m not going to be uncritical.
I always look for the theoretical streak in a
textbook, and in this case, I found it fainter
than expected. Here are two examples: for
one, the scene-setting section claims to
offer a background to the study of cognition
but is little more than a potted history of
psychology, rounding up the usual suspects.
And poor Broadbent is nowhere to be seen,
neither are the revolutions in information
processing in other disciplines which helped
engender cognitive psychology (Lindsay
and Norman’s title was no accident).
Spooling forward to the present day for the
second example, it was astonishing to see
so little mention of the current vogue for
evolutionary theorising. Whatever you
might think of it as an explanatory scheme,
evolutionary psychology has brought about
as large a boost to hypothesis generation as
did connectionism in the 1980s. Pinker’s
giant tome on the subject2 is not even cited.
So, does the book succeed, would I
recommend it to my students? Well, yes and
no. It is distinct, but not excessively so, from
other textbooks. However, there is not the
level of detail, and especially theory, that one
would find in a more specialist text. The book
is aimed at ‘upper-division undergraduate or
beginning postgraduate students’(p. ix), but I
fear it may not be specialized enough for this
sector, and not general enough for students
at an earlier stage, to separate them from
their cash. If you decide to use it for teaching,
best order some copies for your library, one
for yourself, and put it on your booklist.
Ken Manktelow
University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna
Street, Wolverhampton, UK WV1 1SB.
e-mail: k.i.manktelow@wlv.ac.uk
References
1 Eysenck, M.W. and Keane, M.T. (2000) Cognitive
Psychology: A Student’s Handbook, Psychology
Press
2 Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works, Penguin