300645 VO Animal Cognition 2 (2008S)

The two-parts course (1st part in winter, 2nd part in summer) is an introduction into the fields of animal learning, cognition and perception, yet contains enough depth and reference to current research to serve the most advanced student of psychology and biology. The second part ("How Animals Understand the World") covers the question of how animals adaptively modify their behavior through learning. The main topics are: General principles of learning: Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning; laws of associative learning; flexibility and updating of learning; discrimination learning, categorization and search images; memory (e.g. food caching); insightful behavior, concepts, causal understanding; social learning, animal awareness, theory of mind and language. Questions of animal sensations and bioethics will be touched.