How can anthropomorphism be incorporated into the comparative cognition studies?

Abstract

Anthropomorphim is an enduring controversy in comparative cognition. Some studies in comparative cognition search for human-like behavior as evidence for evolutionary continuity of mental processes as Darwin encouraged. Others eschew interpreting observed behaviors in terms of anthropomorphic mental processes. Even in the former cases, students of comparative cognition often use the predictions by associative learning or reinforcement learning as killjoy explanations to examine the existence of complex cognitive processes shared between humans and other species. In the present paper, I reviewed some of such challenges, including my own, to show how anthropomorphic questions can be studied scientifically. I also reviewed other studies in which the killjoy explanations were inappropriately applied. Misuses of the killjoy explanations are typically revealed by showing human adults behave differently from the experimenters anthropomorphic predictions. Key