Grau and Joynes (2005) assess the current state of the field of animal learning and behavior, with particular emphasis on pedagogical and curricular issues. They suggest that the conventional framework which organizes lecture material around methodology is flawed and that an organization around mechanism should be used instead. They also advocate a shift from a purely behavioral approach to research on learning and behavior to a neural-functionalist approach more akin to contemporary behavioral neuroscience. While I support many of the suggestions for improving instruction, I disagree with their proposed shift away from purely behavioral investigations of animal behavior. Behavioral research continues to be a thriving and productive source of empirical and theoretical discoveries. The diverse array of specialized methodologies that have been developed to pursue this work are still paying dividends by illuminating the nature of behavioral mechanisms. Banishing purely behavioral approaches to learning and behavior, such as those used to study associative learning, animal cognition, and comparative psychology, would severely hamper our knowledge of behavioral mechanism.

The human body—an amazing biological system that scales up fractally from its cellular building blocks—exhibits an incredible ability to self heal. Why then, are chronic diseases and degeneration on the rise in the population? Why are we sicker, more obese, and more depressed and stressed than ever before in human history? Why can’t we heal? The answers to these questions may lie in our ancestry, and modern departure from the human ecological niche. The ability to heal requires proper spatio-temporal inputs—nutrition, sleep, stress, activity, and socialization—in order for cellular signaling to occur properly across semi-permeable cell membranes. We first review key steps in the evolutionary history of multicellular life, focusing on the fundamental role of cell-cell interactions. Next, we present this as an important framework by which to understand how the entrainment of physiological signals in homeostatic mechanisms reveals new insights into the processes of disease. Examples are drawn from the evolution of metabolism, nutrition, and respiration in multicellular life. We argue that disease processes result from a mismatch between the physiological inputs an individual receives and their optimal amount and fractal distribution as determined by an individual’s ancestry. A comparative analysis is a useful tool by which to illuminate deep homologies that reveal a mechanistic account for disease processes. This cell-molecular approach provides a useful contrast to the traditional reductionist approach to disease exemplified by the human genome project. As an example, we describe how cell-cell communication drives the ontogeny and phylogeny of physiology, producing the tissues, organs, and organ systems that hierarchically serve human physiology on various levels. Modern society, with its disconnected and stress-riddled lifestyle, is increasingly failing to provide the proper inputs for healthy gene expression and physiological function. Thus, the answers to our modern health woes—physical, mental, and social—may lie in acknowledging the powerful roles that our past has played in shaping our bodies. Finding ways to provide the proper inputs of the human ecological niche in the modern day may lead to significant, perhaps staggering improvements in our health and wellness. The fractal mathematics underpinning these dynamics also serves as a metaphor for the Ancestral Health Movement, which is currently arising as a multi-cultural, multi-national grass-roots pluralistic phenomenon.

Children love to play. Why do they find such a frivolous activity so pleasurable and desirable? Perhaps it is not frivolous, but instead is an adaptation designed to guide proper cognitive development in human children. To understand why, I marshal evidence from different fields to build a case for play as a central behavioral mechanism of human brain and cognitive development. I start with a discussion of human evolution, focusing on the evolution of human physiology, tool-use, the human brain, and life-history strategy, and development, and how these are all connected as an adaptive suite. The anthropological and developmental evidence suggests the existence of an extended childhood adapted to establish the skills, knowledge, and understanding necessary to become a successful hunter-gatherer. I also compare human and chimpanzee brain development, and how brain-specific genes evolved uniquely in humans to foster human brain development. I conclude with the evidence from developmental psychology that even contemporary, first-world children are born with the drive to learn and develop intellectually through play. In this framework, human play can be viewed as an adaptation that guides human brain development to produce curious, intelligent and well-adjusted adults. I close by speculating on the possibility that barriers to or constraints on play may hamper intellectual and cognitive development. I focus on the important concept of developmental decanlization as a mechanism of evolutionary mismatch. I argue that more empirical study is needed to better understand the importance of play compared to other forms of education for optimal intellectual and cognitive development.

The study of intelligence in humans has been ongoing for over 100 years, including the underlying structure, predictive validity, related cognitive measures, and source of differences. One of the key findings in intelligence research is the uniform positive correlations among cognitive tasks. Factor analysis consistently extracts one factor that can account for approximately half of the variance in performance. This factor is termed g and all cognitive tasks positively load onto this factor. This has been replicated with every cognitive test battery in humans. Nevertheless, many other aspects of intelligence research have revealed contradictory lines of evidence. Recently, cognitive test batteries have been developed for animals to examine similarities to humans in cognitive structure. When mice and some avian species are assessed with cognitive test batteries, performance positively correlates and the first component extracted has similar properties to g. There are some limitations to the species tested thus far, including comparability in the cognitive domains assessed across species and homogeneous samples. The pigeon is an ideal subject to overcome these issues since pigeons, humans, and other primates are frequently given similar tasks. We created a test battery for pigeons that assessed different cognitive domains, including associative learning, short term memory, cognitive flexibility, and reaction time. This test battery was administered to 23 subjects that ranged in age from 6 months to 18 years old. The tasks included were sufficiently sensitive to detect individual differences, while still being reliable measures of performance. Despite the strengths of the test battery, we did not consistently extract a g like factor. Analyses indicated a two-component structure, where the associative learning and reaction time tasks loaded onto component 1, while short term memory and cognitive flexibility tasks loaded onto component 2. While it is impossible to determine what these components represent from the results of these experiments alone, we speculated that these components could reflect reliance on different underlying cognitive abilities, degree of automaticity, and sensitivity to age related decline. Additional research, including administering test batteries to other species, will be necessary to fully understand why pigeons show two-components instead of g.

Animals and humans may learn much information when presented with a series of images at various locations. The order in which the objects appear, the order of locations in which they appear, and whether those locations vary or are stable for any given object will impact how and what the subject may learn. Encoding these patterns can allow for optimal responses in identifying objects and locations in the future. Many studies have examined object-location learning, and sequence learning in mammals. However, there is less research in other phyla. Birds offer a prime taxonomic group in which to investigate these abilities. Though separated from mammals for 300 million years they are able to learn to perform many spatial and memory feats necessary to survive. As many of these abilities are shared with mammals, birds offer us two opportunities first, to look into our own evolutionary and possibly developmental past, and second, to investigate alternative ways of completing the same cognitive functions.

This research will focus primarily on learning through the incidental encoding of object and location sequences. Incidental encoding is the learning of relationships and functions with the explicit knowledge of what is learned. Incidental encoding is of particular interest in this research as it plays a key role in survival under changing and unpredictable conditions. Incidental learning relies on a separate encoding mechanism from explicit encoding and goes through separate aging processes (Krinsky-McHale, Kittler, Brown, Jenkins, & Devenny, 2005; Naveh-Benjamin et al., 2009; Neill, Beck, Bottalico, & Molloy, 1990; Qin et al., 2014; Smith, Urgolites, Hopkins, & Squire, 2014). As every day in the world exposes an animal to a wide variety of stimuli, it is important to understand what and how information is selected for encoding. Such selection is necessary as it would be cumbersome for the animal to remember everything it experienced., However, it is never known exactly what information will be necessary in the future. Memory processes may have been shaped to be sensitive to many aspects within a task and use such information to direct such incidental encoding.