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In the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) was introduced to the United States, quickly spreading across the country. For a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the observation of sparrow behavior was something of an urban pastime. Traits such as intelligence, reason, persistence, and craftsmanship were conferred onto sparrows by American urbanites. This paper argues that sparrow intelligence was often conflated with domestication: the ability of the birds to adapt to living alongside humans. Praise for the ingenuity of sparrows generally revolved around their nest building, particularly when such structures overcame the challenges posed by urban infrastructure and technology. Sparrows were far less praiseworthy when they caused electricity outages or contaminated water supplies. The sparrow in the United States demonstrates how the relationship between these anecdotes and their implications for animal minds was mediated by the technology and infrastructure of cities. Admirers of sparrows were not measuring the birds' mental capacity, but rather their ability to adapt to human habitations. Sparrows were only granted intelligence once they had demonstrated their ability to become domesticated.

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Comparative psychology, in its narrow meaning, refers to the study of the similarities and differences in the psychology and behavior of different species. In a broader meaning, it includes comparisons between different biological and socio-cultural groups, such as species, sexes, developmental stages, ages, and ethnicities. This broader meaning originated by extension from the former narrow meaning, which historically was the original meaning of the phrase (interspecies psychological and behavioral comparisons) and which still today is the focus of the field. Currently, comparative psychology is a subject of study in hundreds of universities all over the world. Nevertheless, a question that is often asked but seldom answered is: when did the phrase comparative psychology first appear and where did it come from? In the present work, we tracked down the origins of the phrase comparative psychology. In order to do so, at first we described the origin of the word psychology, coined in the decade 1510-1520 in the Republic of Venice by Dalmatian Renaissance humanist Marko Marulic Splicanin (1450-1524). Then, to explain where, within the phrase comparative psychology, the term comparative came from, we outlined the origin of the use of the word comparative in reference to interspecies comparisons. Finally, we reported the origin of the combination of the words comparative and psychology to form the phrase comparative psychology, the first usage of which was in 1778 by German scholar Michael Hissmann (1752-1784) from the University of Göttingen. Origins of the phrase in Latin, German, French and English languages are described.

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Though well established in mammals, the cognitive map hypothesis has engendered a decades-long, ongoing debate in insect navigation studies involving many of the field's most prominent researchers. In this paper, I situate the debate within the broader context of 20th century animal behavior research and argue that the debate persists because competing research groups are guided by different constellations of epistemic aims, theoretical commitments, preferred animal subjects, and investigative practices. The expanded history of the cognitive map provided in this paper shows that more is at stake in the cognitive map debate than the truth value of propositions characterizing insect cognition. What is at stake is the future direction of an extraordinarily productive tradition of insect navigation research stretching back to Karl von Frisch. Disciplinary labels like ethology, comparative psychology, and behaviorism became less relevant at the turn of the 21st century, but as I show, the different ways of knowing animals associated with these disciplines continue to motivate debates about animal cognition. This examination of scientific disagreement surrounding the cognitive map hypothesis also has significant consequences for philosophers' use of cognitive map research as a case study.

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This paper considers the epistemic career of visual media in ethology in the mid-20th century. Above all, ethologists claimed close contact with research animals and drew scientific evidence from these human-animal communities, particularly in public relations. However, if we look into the toolboxes of comparative behavioral biologists, it becomes evident that scientifically valid research results were primarily obtained by experimenting with model images. These visual specimens tell a technical story of the methodological requirements in behavioral science necessary to bridge everyday observations between the laboratory and the field. By neutralizing individual traces of animal bodies as well as their observers, they prompted the abstraction of ethological hypotheses. The case study of East-German biologist Günter Tembrock (1918-2011), who maintained his own collection of newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, and films, offers a new perspective on the methodological development of this field. Furthermore, this article contributes to a scholarly discussion geared toward expanding the spaces of ethological research. My analysis of the image collections of the Forschungsstätte für Tierpsychologie presents the archive as a relevant site of study in the history of ethology.

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A conception of the idiotic mind was used to substantiate late 19th-century theories of mental evolution. A new school of animal/comparative psychologists attempted from the 1870s to demonstrate that evolution was a mental as well as a physical process. This intellectual enterprise necessitated the closure, or narrowing, of the 'consciousness gap' between human and animal species. A concept of a quasi-non-conscious human mind, set against conscious intention and ability in higher animals, provided an explanatory framework for the human-animal continuum and the evolution of consciousness. The article addresses a significant lacuna in the historiographies of intellectual disability, animal science, and evolutionary psychology, where the application of a conception of human idiocy to advance theories of consciousness evolution has not hitherto been explored. These ideas retain contemporary resonance in ethology and cognitive psychology, and in the theory of 'speciesism', outlined by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), which claims that equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of the human species, and advocates euthanasia of intellectually disabled human infants. Speciesism remains at the core of animal rights activism today. The article also explores the influence of the idea of the semi-evolved idiot mind in late-Victorian anthropology and neuroscience. These ideas operated in a separate intellectual sphere to eugenic thought. They were (and remain) deeply influential, and were at the heart of the idea of the moral idiot or imbecile, targeted in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, as well as in 20th-century animal and human consciousness theory.

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Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally "smart" species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term "cognition" has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not "one cognition". Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which-although always at the forefront of biology-has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model.

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The Dutch animal psychologist Frederik J. J. Buytendijk (1887-1974) developed an anti-reductionist approach in his ethological research of the 1920s and 1930s distinct from behaviorism, explicitly including in his experimental practices the freedom of animals, variable observations, and the subjective experience of the investigator. Buytendijk thereby developed a scientific theory that methodologically relied on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and concepts of unity based on gestalt theory, but did not abandon quantitative data collection. On the contrary, in his Groningen institute Buytendijk based his work on the biological theories of Jakob von Uexküll and specifically investigated the thesis of an "animal-environment unit". Using this institutional framework and two experiments (1924 & 1931), this article determines to what extent Buytendijk was able to verify his statement that the animal was "born with and in its environment", which at the same time supported his scientific-philosophical concept. Accordingly, Buytendijk understood the environment as an organ of the animal, not only as a metaphor, but also as reality.

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The past decade has witnessed the development of powerful, genetically encoded tools for manipulating and monitoring neuronal function in freely moving animals. These tools are most readily deployed in genetic model organisms and efforts to map the circuits that govern behavior have increasingly focused on worms, flies, zebrafish, and mice. The traditional virtues of these animals for genetic studies in terms of small size, short generation times, and ease of animal husbandry in a laboratory setting have facilitated rapid progress, and the neural basis of an increasing number of behaviors is being established at cellular resolution in each of these animals. The depth and breadth of this analysis should soon offer a significantly more comprehensive understanding of how the circuitry underlying behavior is organized in particular animals and promises to help answer long-standing questions that have waited for such a brain-wide perspective on nervous system function. The comprehensive understanding achieved in genetic model animals is thus likely to make them into paradigmatic examples that will serve as touchstones for comparisons to understand how behavior is organized in other animals, including ourselves.

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Este artículo presenta una revisión de la utilización de modelos animales en los orígenes de la ciencia de la salud mental y provee un ejemplo de mediados del siglo pasado, acerca del desarrollo de una importante y efectiva terapia a partir de la investigación con modelos animales, haciendo notar que muchos clínicos no conocen esta historia. A continuación esta revisión discute lo adecuado de la estructura de un modelo animal, presentando muchas contribuciones de estos modelos a nuestra ciencia, incluyendo algunas que constituyeron aplicaciones inesperadas surgidas de la investigación con animales, que no se realizaron con objetivos aplicativos. Se discute además un ejemplo contemporáneo de la investigación con animales, que generó aplicaciones potenciales en pacientes. Finalmente, se presentan las implicaciones para la ciencia, la práctica y la docencia.

The formal study of animals as a way to gain insight into human behavior might be claimed to begin with Meyer in the 19th Century. Meyer's understanding of the potential power of the comparative approach has not been shared by many contemporary clinical practitioners even in this day. At the same time, Wolpe became dissatisfied with the ineffectiveness of the then available psychotherapies for treating clients with phobias. Wolpe undertook his researches using cats, first inducing fears and then seeking ways to reduce and eliminate those fears. The most effective way to reduce fears in cats had two components: (1) inducing a state that was incompatible with fear by feeding the animals, and (2) while in this fear-incompatible state, presenting and extinguishing, little-by-little, the fear eliciting stimulus. He generalized this to patients and developed what we now call systematic desensitization for the treatment of phobias. Pavlov was the first experimental animal researcher to use the modeling process to study how findings from animals can be used to study psychological processes in humans (including dysfunctional ones) and to test therapeutic treatments for humans based on tests in animals. The behavior labeled experimental neuroses didn't occur in just one animal but in virtually all animals subjected to the procedure of increasingly difficult discriminations. Shenger-Krestonikova demonstrated that neuroses were likely the natural, lawful consequence of particular forms of challenge to the animal. Another of Pavlov's associates, Krasnogorsky went on to show that exactly the same conditioning operations and environmental challenges in children yielded the same neurotic consequences. There are two important messages here for us: the first is the illustration of the nature of the modeling process in seeking parallels of causal chains between systems. The second is the demonstration that neurotic behaviors are not the result of abnormal disease states but rather the natural consequences of specific abnormal environmental challenges. Overmier and Seligman's discovery in dogs of learned helplessness was later extended to understanding reactive depression. They focused on the uncontrollability of events that characterize classical conditioning by exposing dogs to a series of unpredictable and uncontrollable aversive events. They found that extended experience with uncontrollable traumatic events induced a syndrome of deficits. The syndrome was composed of three major deficits: (1) Behavioral (they where not motivated to initiate responding), (2) Psychological / Cognitive (they did not learn to associate actions and outcomes), and (3) Emotional (they were passive in the face of pain). The additional features included deficits in immune function, increased vulnerability to gastrointestinal disturbances, and dramatic alterations / depletions in brain neurochemistry. The nature of memory has long fascinated psychologists since the 19th Century researches of Ebbinghaus. Trapold and Overmier developed a discriminative choice task paradigm in which the rewards for each kind of correct response were unique to that kind of correct choice. When they compared the results of the common outcomes method to those of the differential outcomes method, they found dramatic effects that they called the differential outcomes effect. The differential outcome procedure yields faster learning, learning to a higher asymptote, and more persistent memory during the delay between the cues and the choices, and resistance to disruption during the delay. It turns out that this effect of differential outcomes training on learning, memory, and performance is a very general finding across a range of species (including humans of all ages). These results have important potential for helping learning disabled and memory impaired persons. The research examples were meant to convey the message. That message is that contemporary basic science research with animals on fundamental mechanisms continues to produce results that are important and likely helpful to practitioners.