Page "Animal cognition" Paragraph 6

Beginning around 1960, a " cognitive revolution " in research on humans gradually spurred a similar transformation of research with animals.

Inference to processes not directly observable became acceptable and then commonplace.

An important proponent of this shift in thinking was Donald O. Hebb, who argued that " mind " is simply a name for processes in the head that control complex behavior, and that it is both necessary and possible to infer those processes from behavior Animals came to be seen as " goal seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity .".

However, it is interesting to note that many cognitive experiments with animals made, and still make, ingenious use of conditioning methods pioneered by Thorndike and Pavlov.