Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Friederike Range for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the complex social minds of nonhuman animals. Through ingenious experimental approaches,…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Laurie R. Santos for creative and insightful investigations of cognition across a broad range of species and psychological domains, illuminating cognitive…

Charles Darwin made numerous seminal contributions to the study of animal behavior over his long career. This essay places these contributions in the context of Darwin's life, showing his long-standing interest in psychological and behavioral issues encompassing all species, including humans. Ten areas are highlighted: natural history;…

Psychology texts often cite the work of Marian and Keller Breland and their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), to demonstrate operant conditioning and the "misbehavior of organisms" from an evolutionary perspective. Now available on the Internet at the official IQ Zoo website (http://www3.uca.edu/iqzoo/), the artifacts of ABE's work, in…

This article describes the design and implementation of a 1-credit-hour seminar in comparative psychology as a supplement to an introductory biopsychology course. The purpose of the course was to introduce students to the ecological and evolutionary aspects of animal behavior by building on topics that are introduced in many biopsychology courses.…

Chickens, instead of rats, were used in an upper-level laboratory course on animal learning. To help other instructors interested in using chickens for a lab course, a discussion of the physical and behavioral characteristics of chickens is provided. Student reaction to the course is also discussed. (RM)

Marian and Keller Breland pioneered the application of operant psychology to commercial animal training during the 1940s and 1950s. The Brelands' story is relatively unknown in the history of behavior analysis. Using information from the Breland-Bailey papers, this paper describes the development and activities of Animal Behavior Enterprises…

Discusses topics to aid in understanding animal behavior, including the value of the biological approach to psychology, functional systems, optimality and fitness, universality of environmental effects on behavior, and evolution of social behavior. (DS)

Describes exercises designed to give students experience in using methods of naturalistic observation to quantify behavior. Students construct a coding system of the behaviors observed in a small mouse colony, gather data by instantaneous and focal animal sampling, and use the data to calculate interrater reliability and sequence analysis. (GEA)