Bottoms-up! Rejecting Top-down Human-centered Approaches in Comparative Psychology

Abstract

Although comparative psychologists have made considerable strides in the past several decades, expanding the breadth of species and questions examined, the field still suffers from an overemphasis on top-down approaches that begin and end with a focus on humans. This top-down perspective leads to biases and oversights that hamper the further development of the field. A bottom-up approach that considers species-specific abilities and behaviors in the context of theoretically relevant comparisons will be most useful in advancing knowledge of species-specific and shared abilities. This will allow a better determination of the extent to which continuities and discontinuities exist as a function of different ecological forces. In addition, a bottom-up approach will facilitate a shift in focus from using animals to better understand humans, to understanding animals themselves. This new approach will allow for an appreciation of how humans can benefit other species.

Replications, Comparisons, Sampling and the Problem of Representativeness in Animal Cognition Research

“…Concerns about replicability and representativeness have surfaced often in animal behavior and cognition research, at a variety of levels (Beach, 1950;Beran, 2012;Bitterman, 1960;Boesch, 2012Boesch, , 2020Brosnan et al, 2013;Clark et al, 2019;Dacey, 2020;Eaton et al, 2018;Janmaat, 2019;Leavens et al, 2019;Schubiger et al, 2019;Stevens, 2017;Szabó et al, 2017;van Wilgenburg & Elgar, 2013;Vonk, 2019). However, it is unclear whether any real progress has been made towards understanding the prevalence and consequences of low representativeness in these fields, and we suggest that there are four main reasons why, which are theoretical, practical, motivational, and educational (see also Farrar & Ostojić, 2020).…”

“…Clearly, the researcher must sample from different populations of experimental units [dolphins, elephants], and a different population of settings [aquatic, non-aquatic]. However, even though the settings are different in absolute terms, they are the same relative to the experimental unit; the dolphins are tested in water, the elephants on land, and this makes the comparison more valid (Clark et al, 2019;Leavens et al, 2019;Tomasello & Call, 2008), or a 'species-fair' comparison (Boesch, 2007;Brosnan et al, 2013;Eaton et al, 2018;Tomasello & Call, 2008).…”

Replications in Comparative Cognition: What Should We Expect and How Can We Improve?

“…Comparative cognition is a broad field which investigates how animals acquire, process and use information (Beran et al, 2014;Shettleworth, 2009). Within the field there are several different approaches to what cognition is and how best to study it (Bayne et al, 2019;Boyle, 2019;Chittka et al, 2012;Eaton et al, 2018;Heyes, 2019;Zentall, 2018). Nevertheless, most comparative cognition research shares the goal of understanding how cognition evolves by assessing the similarities and differences in cognition across a wide range of species (MacLean et al, 2014;ManyPrimates et al, 2019a, b).…”

Twenty Years after Folk Physics for Apes: Researchers' Understanding of How Nonhumans Understand the World

“…At the very least, most researchers carefully consider alternative interpretations of their results, and ambiguous conclusions pointing to the need for further study appear more prominent in the literature (although see Farrar et al, 2020). Importantly, many comparative researchers have acknowledged the need to avoid top-down approaches to examining nonhuman cognition that are heavily biased by tests for well-known human cognitive processes (see de Waal & Ferrari, 2010;Eaton et al, 2018).…”

“…One of the positive recent changes in the field is the wider recognition that scientists should move beyond so-called "success testing" (Taylor, 2014) toward a more careful study of the mechanisms underlying both successes and failures in human conceived experimental tasks. Unfortunately, this shift has been slow to take hold of the field as a whole (de Waal & Ferarri, 2010;Eaton et al, 2018). It is easy to understand, and even forgive, the resistance to moving away from anthropocentric tests because humans cannot view the world through any lens other than an anthropocentric one.…”