Observing Cognitive Complexity in Primates and Cetaceans

Abstract

This paper on cognitive complexity in primates and cetaceans is a review of studies that use only observational methods. These studies include descriptive accounts, both qualitative and quantitative, of behavior-in-context in naturally-occurring and quasi-experimental settings, especially involving the micro-analysis of video. To unify this piecemeal but burgeoning literature, “cognition” is taken as embodied, largely visible, and distributed across physical and social environments. Its study involves documenting the adaptation of behavior to changing conditions, especially in ontogeny, tool-use, and social discourse. The studies selected for this review focus on the cognitive complexity that is apparent in the versatility, the hierarchical organization, and the long-term patterning of such behavioral adaptations. Versatility is seen, for example, in the substitution of different acts or objects into established routines, in the size and flexibility of action repertoires that enable variably configured and sequenced performances, and in the marked occurrence of individual differences. Hierarchical organization is seen in the substitution or iteration of a subroutine that fails to disrupt its larger routine, in the simultaneous embedding of one social interaction within the frame of another (as in “social tool” use), and in the insertion of a novel or borrowed subroutine as a tactical response, especially one that temporarily redirects an animal‟s trajectory. The complexity apparent in long-term patterning includes tracking and making selective use of multiple histories (e.g., concerning kinship, rank, etc.) whose predictions and tactics may vary, responding to “market” values that change with ecological and social factors, and exploiting traditions of practice which provide social and material resources that shape engagement and learning. While this literature includes far more primate than cetacean examples, the primate work offers helpful suggestions for settings, issues, and techniques that could be adapted to the sensori-motor, ecological, and social constraints on cetacean cognition. The array of observations reviewed illustrate the utility across species of scoring such parameters as displays of attention in multiple modalities, abrupt trajectory changes, the complementarity and contingency of actions, and the resiliency of sequences, to help identify the media that matter in a given cognitive ecology. Systematic micro-analyses, in conjunction with long-term relational data that track changes in affordances and coordination, make such observational approaches a viable and valuable addition to the study of comparative cognition.