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In Press: “Primate Neuroethology” (eds. A. Ghazanfar and M. Platt)Oxford University Press, New York.
Out of Our Minds:the Neuroethology of Primate Strategic Behaviour
Louise Barrett and Drew RendallDepartment of Psychology University of Lethbridge, T1K 3M4 Alberta, Canadalouise.barrett@uleth.ca d.rendall@uleth.ca 
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1. Introduction
Primates, as an order, are marked by large brains and considerable behavioral flexibility which isperhaps most developed in the social domain. In fact, the unusually intense sociality of the primates,compared to other taxa, sparked a proposal, now firmly entrenched, that the primate niche is largely a social one where selection pressures favoring increasingly complex social strategies are responsiblefor the markedly larger brains of primates (e.g., Jolly 1966; Humphrey 1976; Dunbar 1998).Furthermore, there is a natural assumption that, as our closest living relatives, the monkeys and apeshave something special to tell us about the evolution of our own cognitive capacities as theculmination of such processes. The programs of comparative cognition that these proposals havesparked have been exciting and highly productive, but we also feel that, as often practised, they promote a certain view of the brain and cognition that, increasingly, is leading us astray. In whatfollows, we articulate these concerns, and suggest how we might deal with them.
2. Out of our minds
Following the ‘cognitive revolution’ and the loosening of the stranglehold of behaviourism oncomparative psychology, the study of non-human minds became respectable again (e.g., Griffin1978). One could abandon the Cartesian view that animals were mere automata, and embrace thenotion that the behaviour of non-humans was underpinned by cognitive processes of varying degrees of flexibility and complexity. Evolutionarily speaking, such a move also dispensed with theidea that a profound discontinuity existed between human and non-human animals, picking up onDarwin’s idea that the difference was likely to be one of degree and not of kind (see Penn et al., inpress for a review and critique of this stance). In fact, in recent years, an explicitly anthropocentric,or even anthropomorphic, program of comparative research has (re)emerged and been defended asscientifically legitimate and expressly licensed by this evolutionary perspective (e.g., De Waal 2001;2005).
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Such a stance has no doubt been helped along by the fact that much of primate cognitive ethology has attempted to combine the study of mechanism with that of evolutionary function, where,following Dennett’s influential proposal, intentional language has come to be used frequently as ametaphorical short-hand to characterize the nature of adaptive behaviour (i.e., the so-called ‘free-floating’ rationale [of mother nature]; Dennett 1989) Dennett’s intentional gambit was initially only a practical one – namely, without easy access to the underlying psychology of animals’ behavior, thefield of ethology could nevertheless make progress on the adaptive functions of behavior on theassumption that, like humans, animals behave ‘as if’ they have goals, beliefs, and desires about the world that guide their engagment with it. However, this gambit also makes it all too easy either toside-step the issue of determining the proximate mechanisms that actually do produce behaviour, orto favour an argument in which behaviour that looks similar to our own, and which achieves asimilar functional goal, can, by an appeal to evolutionary parsimony, be assumed to be produced by the same intentional psychological processes (e.g., De Waal 1997). Even when not expressed in suchovertly anthropomorphic terms, a focus only on continuity between human and non-human minds, without equal attention to the difference, can, and has, led to a rather narrow focus, where only those questions that speak to this intentional conception of action are tackled, and possiblealternatives are seldom even considered (Owren and Rendall 2001).Studies of primate communication are a case in point. Seminal work by Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler(1980) on vervet monkeys documented a small repertoire of alarm calls specific to different classesof predator, each call prompting a functionally different escape response appropriate to the predatorencountered. The calls clearly functioned as if they stood for, or represented, those predators in thesame way our own human words for these animals do, and these the functional similarities weretaken to reflect deeper cognitive similarities, rooted in language-like representational and intentional
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