Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:41:55.022Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Animal Problem Solving

Innovative Use of Tools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

Zygmunt Pizlo
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Get access

Summary

This chapter begins with a review of insight problem solving done by infrahuman animals. This work started when Wolfgang Köhler performed his informal studies of chimpanzees over 100 years ago on Tenerife. Are chimps smart because they have large brains? The size of its brain seems to be only weakly related to an animal's intelligence. What seem to be more important are the mental mechanisms that an animal uses, including, or perhaps primarily, the animal’s ability to visualize physical and geometrical transformations, such as the ability to realize that one's reflection in a mirror is a 3D image of one’s body. This ability was tested extensively with both chimpanzees and monkeys. A more elaborate experimental design was subsequently used to test the chimps’ ability to perform visual-motor coordinations with a transformed camera image. Next, the problem-solving ability of crows, parrots, and hyenas is described, and this chapter ends with the presentation of results of experiments performed by chimps and monkeys on solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP). The TSP is one of the best-studied problems both in cognitive psychology and in computer science. Human performance on the TSP is discussed in detail in the following two chapters. You will discover how sophisticated, but naïve, human subjects are when confronted with solving the TSP.

Type
Chapter
Information
Problem Solving
Cognitive Mechanisms and Formal Models
, pp. 14 - 33
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Animal Problem Solving
  • Zygmunt Pizlo, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Problem Solving
  • Online publication: 23 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205603.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Animal Problem Solving
  • Zygmunt Pizlo, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Problem Solving
  • Online publication: 23 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205603.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Animal Problem Solving
  • Zygmunt Pizlo, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Problem Solving
  • Online publication: 23 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205603.003
Available formats
×