Evolutionary Ecology of Thinking State of the Art Report

Our group took an initial decision not to discuss the subjective experiences of animals on the grounds that we could see no way of studying them. At first sight, this may seem as though we were avoiding the central issue of the conference altogether, but we took our decision in the belief that by trying to discover the processes, cognitive or otherwise, that lie behind animal behavior, we stood the best chance of being able to generate testable hypotheses. We were thus quite happy to talk about the kinds of cognitive representations that animals might have, but only as long as they could be operationally defined and distinguished by some sort of experiment, however far-fetched. In view of the title given to our group, we took it as our brief to look at the real tasks which animals perform in nature to see if they tell us anything about the rules or algorithms which animals actually use.