Aims

Humans are often believed to be unique among animals in their cognitive abilities. However, these abilities did not arise de novo, but evolved in our lineage under specific selective pressures. This means that other animals which are either closely related to us or have undergone similar selective pressures will have evolved similar cognitive abilities. In this module, the students will explore how different humans really are from other animals in our cognitive abilities, and how cognition can be studied in non-human animals.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module will cover a number of topics in comparative cognition, taught by experts in the respective fields. These will include:

Learning and memory
Mental time travel
Numerosity
Spatial cognition
Language and communication
Consciousness

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

The main teaching method is the interactive seminar, in which the students need to engage with the questions and come up with their own solutions to the problems posed, interspersed with more traditional lecturing on what has already been done in the past. This mix of approaches will allow the students to develop the skills to design their own comparative cognition studies and to start thinking about cognition in its comparative and evolutionary context.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The in-course research proposal assessment is aimed at practising and getting feedback on the skill of designing experiments in comparative cognition; as well as the skill of scientific communication. The students will pick one from a list of topics, all aimed at testing a particular cognitive skill in a new species. They will present their design as a conference poster and oral presentation, these will be presented as if the study had really been conducted. Having formative assessment of the poster allows the students to learn from the feedback on their experimental design and hence really improve their skills and the content of the oral presentation.

The in-course essay will test the ability to think about cognition in a comparative and evolutionary context, and will ask broad questions about the implications of findings in comparative cognition for our understanding of concepts like evolution, consciousness, human uniqueness, etc.

The student will be given formative feedback on the conference poster to allow improvement of the experimental design, before presenting the experiment in the formatively-assessed oral presentation.