Slide 21 of 37
Notes:
Language is such a ubiquitous feature of human cognitive experience that it is difficult to disentangle our verbal representations of objects and events from the perceptual and conceptual features of those objects. It is difficult to tell how much of our intelligence is due to language and how much is due to the processes that provide the foundation for language.
The study of animal cognition provides a perspective from which to ask these questions. It lets us view human cognition as one among alternative forms of cognition. Because we generally do not have strong intuitions about the nature of animal cognitive processing, as we do for our own processing, we can approach animal cognition from a more skeptical and analytic perspective. It is more difficult to miss assumptions about the processes that are hidden by our own familiarity with our own cognitive processes.
