Roger K R Thompson

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Franklin & Marshall College

Simple Summary Coercion and non-voluntary procedures can cause fear, anxiety and maladaptive behaviors for captive animals, which makes animal husbandry and care more difficult and reduces animal welfare overall. Positive reinforcement training (i.e., using rewards for desired behaviors rather than punishment for undesirable behaviors) is shown to...

There is compelling evidence over many decades of the ability of old-world and new-world monkeys to judge absolute stimulus properties (i.e. form, size and color) to be the same or different. However, when it comes to judging relations-between-relations to be the same or different the answer is, regardless of species or task, some can, but definite...

Abstract Tonic Immobility (TI) functions as anti-predator defense. Its duration depends on cues signaling predator proximity. One such cue includes alarm calls from conspecifics and non-conspecifics. This study aimed to determine the cue within alarm calls that controls TI duration. We induced TI in chicks (Gallus gallus) and found that their TI du...

Scientists hoping to elucidate the origin of human stone tool manufacture and use have looked to extant primate species for possible clues. Although some skepticism has been raised, there is clear evidence that today’s capuchin monkeys can make and use stone tools.

Mixed-species exhibits are becoming increasingly common in the captive management of a wide range of species. Systematic evaluations of enclosures consisting of multiple subspecies, however, are relatively infrequent. The aim of this study was to measure seasonal trends in aggressive behaviors within a captive pack of wolves and wolf-dog crosses in...

Reasoning by analogy is one of the most complex and highly adaptive cognitive processes in abstract thinking. For humans, analogical reasoning entails the judgment and conceptual mapping of relations-between-relations and is facilitated by language (Gentner in Cogn Sci 7:155-170, 1983; Premack in Thought without language, Oxford University Press, N...

Analogical reasoning is considered the hallmark of human reasoning, but some studies have demonstrated that language- and symbol-trained chimpanzees can also reason analogically. Despite the potential adaptive value of this ability, evidence from other studies strongly suggests that other nonhuman primates do not have this capacity for analogical r...

Monkeys, unlike chimpanzees and humans, have a marked difficulty acquiring relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks that likely reflect the cognitive foundation upon which analogical reasoning rests. In the present study, rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) completed a categorical (identity and nonidentity) RMTS task with differential reward (pellet...

Perhaps the most well-known work by the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte is a painting entitled “La trahison des images” (The treason of images), from 1929, consisting of a brown smoking pipe suspended upon a uniform background with the caption “Ce n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). Magritte’s intent was to challenge observers’ preco...

Thus far, language- and token-trained apes (e.g., D. Premack, 1976; R. K. R. Thompson, D. L. Oden, & S. T. Boysen, 1997) have provided the best evidence that nonhuman animals can solve, complete, and construct analogies, thus implicating symbolic representation as the mechanism enabling the phenomenon. In this study, the authors examined the role o...

We argue that formal analogical reasoning is not a uniquely human trait but is found in chimpanzees, if not in monkeys. We also contest the claim that the relational matching-to-sample task is not exemplary of analogical behavior, and we provide evidence that symbolic-like treatment of relational information can be found in nonhuman species, a poin...

The focus of much of comparative and develop-mental cognition has been on the individual as a solitary being whose behavior is isolated from the influence of social relationships. We report here results on access to and use of reaching tools by group-housed capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and a cohort of human infants in a daycare setting. In both...

Analogy has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive science over the past two decades. Through analogy, novel situations and problems can be understood in terms of familiar ones. Indeed, a case can be made for analogical processing as the very core of cognition. This is the first book to span the full range of disciplines concerned with a...

Recent studies of conceptual capacities in primates point to a fundamental distinction between monkeys on the one hand, and apes and humans on the other (Thompson & Oden, in press). The overall pattern of results suggests that monkeys, but not apes and humans, might be best regarded as "paleo-logicans" in the sense that they form class concepts on...

Studies of the conceptual abilities of nonhuman primates demonstrate the substantial range of these abilities as well as their limitations. Such abilities range from categorization on the basis of shared physical attributes, associative relations and functions to abstract concepts as reflected in analogical reasoning about relations between relatio...

Three chimpanzees with a history of conditional and numeric token training spontaneously matched relations between relations under conditions of nondifferential reinforcement. Heretofore, this conceptual ability was demonstrated only in language-trained chimpanzees. The performance levels of the language-naive animals in this study, however, were e...

We review the evidence for three important disparities involving the perception and judgment of identity relations by human and nonhuman primates. First, only humans beyond infancy and adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with a history of language or token training can explicitly judge relations (same or different) between relations (identity and n...

Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans, and other species, focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. Several chapters focus on the controversial question of whether gorillas, like ot...

We used a familiarization-novelty procedure to determine whether 4 infant chimpanzees spontaneously perceive the sameness of and the difference between both concrete objects and relations between objects. In Experiment 1, a single object was presented on the Familiarization Trial 1 and the animal's looking time recorded. On the Test Trial 2, an obj...

We used a familiarization-novelty procedure to determine whether 4 infant chimpanzees spontaneously perceive the sameness of and the difference between both concrete objects and relations between objects. In Experiment 1, a single object was presented on the Familiarization Trial 1 and the animal's looking time recorded. On the Test Trial 2, an obj...

The daily perch-hop activity of six captive European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) was observed under natural lighting over 12 months. Moderately high levels of early morning activity gradually declined throughout the day. Unlike robins (Turdus migratorius), however, the starlings showed no evidence of the brief burst of activity at dusk calledroost...

Four infant chimpanzees learned a matching-to-sample task when only two training stimuli were used. They then spontaneously transferred the matching concept to novel items, including three-dimensional objects and fabric swatches, without any experimenter-provided differential feedback. These results support the view that the matching concept is bro...

This article describes a comparative psychology course that attempts to demonstrate the power of the comparative method for a complete understanding of psychological phenomena typically taught from a human-oriented perspective. A description of methodological goals and the traditional roles of comparative psychology precede the course description....

An experimenter induced tonic immobility (TI) in parentally naive chicks (G. gallusdomesticus). The chicks remained in TI longer when they were exposed to a conspecific adult fear squawk alarm call than when exposed to an equally novel attraction call or white noise. In a second experiment, both aerial-predator and ground-predator alarm calls enhan...

Pigeons were trained on a delayed discrimination task in which they were rewarded for pecking a white terminal stimulus (TS) presented 5 sec after a green initial stimulus (IS) and for not pecking the white TS when it followed a red IS. Each bird bridged the memory interval (MI) with overt mediational behaviors. Nevertheless, sustained retroactive...

This chapter describes current research in the area of “short term,” or, “working memory” in animals. The memory processes provide a model for the actual functioning of working memory in the “real lives” of many animals, and learn about temporal contingencies in their environment and make appropriate, adaptive response decisions. When the same init...

The short-term memory for sounds of the bottlenosed dolphin was tested using symbolic, identity, and probe forms of the delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. The forms differed in the number (one or two) or nature (symbolic or identity matches of sample sounds) of postdelay test stimuli available as memory retrieval cues. Although symbolic DMS was...

In a two-choice experiment, cats (Felis domesticus) chose an active quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica) more often than a quail in tonic immobility (TI). In a second experiment, cats were individually presented with two active quail in an open field. Holding and biting by the cat, particularly about the neck, was necessary for inducing TI in a bird....

Working memory in a bottlenosed dolphin was tested in both indirect and direct auditory delayed-discrimination tasks in which a correct spatial response was conditional upon the nature of a preceding sound. In the indirect task, either one of two possible sounds was briefly presented. After a prescribed delay, the dolphin was cued to go either to a...

After listening to a list of as many as six discriminably different 2-second sounds, a bottle-nosed dolphin classified a subsequent probe sound as either "old" (from the list) or "new." The probability of recognizing an old probe was close to 1.0 if it matched the most recent sound in the list and decreased sigmoidally for successively earlier list...

Frequency difference limens (DLs) were obtained for frequencies (F) from 1 to 140 kHz for the bottlenosed dolphin, Tursiops truncatus (Montagu), and from 1 to 8 kHz for two human subjects tested underwater. Discriminations were required between constant-frequency (pure-tone) signals and frequency-modulated signals, using a successive discrimination...

Rats trained to bar press for septal intracranial reinforcement (ICR) did not show a time dependent decreasing resistance to extinction as reported for hypothalamic ICR rats [8]. This is inconsistent with the inclusive drive-decay theory interpretation of those results. In both conditions of immediate (no delay) and delayed (1 hr) extinction, bar p...

report on the results of . . . replication of [an experiment by Epstein, Lanza, and Skinner (1981), which reports success in training pigeons to peck at a spot on their bodies that could only be seen with the aid of a mirror], as well as on spin-off experiments designed to parse out various factors underlying the pigeons' behavior / identify which...

Notes that the chimpanzee Sarah was the first nonhuman primate observed to solve relational matching tasks, including 4-term analogy problems. This chapter describes an extensive series of reanalyses of data from tests of Sarah's analogy ability, with the goal of assessing the possibility that her successes might be attributable to simpler nonanalo...

Recent research indicates that early in life humans and chimpanzees have perceptual and Language-training, or prior experience with cognitive precursors for the development of arbitrarysymbolsfortheabstractconcepts"same higher level analogical information process- and different", appears to be necessary before ing abilities that are not shared by a...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1976. Bibliography: leaves 153-169. Microfiche. ix, 169 leaves ill