Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations?
This chapter compares cognitive and associative accounts of behaviour by animals on transitive inference tasks. It explains that transitive relationships are often important to animals and that transitive inference would permit an animal to behave in a way appropriate to the dominance relation between other animals even if their relationship has not been directly ascertained. It illustrates a more general methodological dispute between ethological and experimental approaches to animal cognition.
Keywords: animal behaviour, cognitive behaviour, associative behaviour, transitive inference, animal cognition
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