Comparative cognition is the comparison of how animals (including humans) process and interact with the world. What sets animal cognition apart from the behavioristic tradition of stimulus-response (S-R) learning is the recognition that (mental) processes intervene between the stimulus and response. Some animal-cognitive procedures may be complex (e.g., "feeling of knowing" experiments by Hampton, 2001). But even "simple" Pavlovian conditioning procedures can deal with cognitive processes: for example, taste-aversion conditioning to the "image" of an expected type of food (e.g., Holland, 1990), or higher-order and backward fear conditioning to a neutral stimulus never paired with shock (Cole, Barnet, and Miller, 1995). Techniques developed in the late twentieth century to study cognitive processes have produced exciting revelations about how animals perceive, learn, remember, navigate, communicate, time, and count. This entry highlights some of these developments.

Figure 1
An information-processing model of temporal processing representative of scalar timing theory.

Interval Timing