THE PHYLOGENY AND ONTOGENY OF SERIAL MEMORY - LIST LEARNING BY PIGEONS AND MONKEYS

The study of cognitive processes in animals provides a unique opportunity to investigate the phylogeny and ontogeny of cognition. Much of our understanding of human cognition derives from the intensive study of adult human subjects. Serial learning provides an instructive example. Since Ebbinghaus, experiments on serial learning have been performed almost exclusively on subjects who have had much experience learning lists by virtue of their formal and informal education. Recent research on serial learning in pigeons and monkeys provides a new perspective on this fundamental skill, which does not require language and which appears to be phylogenetically quite old. This research has also revealed qualitative differences in how pigeons and monkeys represent lists they learn to produce and provided opportunities to observe the development of list-learning strategies starting with a subject's first list.