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We cannot test animals for insight's distinctive phenomenology, the "aha" experience, but we can study the processes underlying insightful behaviour, classically described by Köhler as sudden solution of a problem after an impasse. The central question in the study of insightful behaviour in any species is whether it is the product of a distinctive cognitive process, insight. Although some claims for insight in animals confuse it with other problem-solving processes, contemporary research on string pulling and other physical problems, primarily with birds, has uncovered new examples of insightful behaviour and shed light on the role of experience in producing it. New research suggests insightful behaviour can be captured in common laboratory tasks while brain activity is monitored, opening the way to better integration of research on animals with the cognitive neuroscience of human insight.
Keywords: insight, comparative cognition, problem solving, animals, learning
A chimpanzee gestures fruitlessly toward a banana lying beyond arm's reach. An elephant extends its trunk toward an apple hanging high overhead. When animals are confronted with inaccessible rewards like these, do they ever use insight to solve the problem of getting them? That is, do they seem to suddenly see a solution? This question was central to some of the earliest studies of animal problem solving (Boakes, 1984). It also motivated the seminal work of Köhler (1925/1959) and figured in Thorpe's (1956) discussion of learning in animals, but otherwise the question whether nonhuman species have insight was largely neglected by comparative psychologists for most of the 20th century. One exception was D. O. Hebb (1949), in whose honour this essay is written and whose contributions are discussed later in this article.
Recently the study of animal insight has reemerged as part of the burgeoning field of comparative cognition. Contemporary research on many topics in this field such as memory, numerical and spatial cognition, and theory of mind has become seamlessly integrated with theory and data from cognitive neuroscience and human cognitive and developmental psychology (see Shettleworth, 2010a). A good example is in the study of numerical cognition. Parallel experiments with monkeys and children have uncovered common systems for precise assessment of small numbers of items and for approximate representations of large quantities (Cantlon, Piatt, & Brannon, 2009). These same systems are...