Issues in the Comparative Cognition of Abstract-Concept Learning

concept learning, including same/different and matching-to-sample concept learning, provides the basis for many other forms of "higher" cognition.The issue of which species can learn abstract concepts and the extent to which abstractconcept learning is expressed across species is discussed.Definitive answers to this issue are argued to depend on the subjects' learning strategy (e.g., a relational-learning strategy) and the particular procedures used to test for abstract-concept learning.Some critical procedures that we have identified are: How to present the items to-be-compared (e.g., in pairs), a high criterion for claiming abstract-concept learning (e.g., transfer performance equivalent to baseline performance), and systematic manipulation of the training set (e.g., increases in the number of rule exemplars when transfer is less than baseline performance).The research covered in this article on the recent advancements in abstract-concept learning show this basic ability in higher-order cognitive processing is common to many animal species and that "uniqueness" may be limited more to how quickly new abstract concepts are learned rather than to the ability itself.Abstract concepts are said to be the basis of higher order cognition in human, and no concept is more important than the concept of identity.William James (1890/1950) was perhaps the first to note that our "sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking."(p.459).Over the past century, the ability to judge whether items are the same or different has been a central focus in cognitive development, cognition, and comparative cognition (e.g., Daehler & Bukatko, 1985;Mackintosh, 2000;Shettleworth, 1998;Thompson & Oden, 2000).For example, abstract thinking is considered to be the basis of equivalence operations in math (e.g., "item I is the same as item J"), conservation tasks, and may be a necessary prerequisite for learning language (e.g., Marcus et al., 1999;Piaget & Inhelder, 1966/1969;Siegler, 1996).This thinking is abstract because it is based on rules which allow subjects' judgments to transcend the training stimuli and is therefore called higher order.Abstract-concept learning is the focus of this article.Issues of testing and verifying abstract-concept learning with animals in same/ different (S/D) and matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks are discussed.In addition, we review some of the research on abstract-concept learning.In cognitive and comparative psychology, abstract-concept learning is, unfortunately, often confused with categorization because both are frequently referred to as concept learning.To clarify, there are two types of categorization, 1) natural concepts, which are accounted for by stimulus generalization based on specific features, and 2) associative concepts, which are accounted for by second-order conditioning.Natural concept learning (also called perceptual concept learning) involves categorizing (sorting) stimuli (e.g., those found in nature like pictures of birds, flowers, people, or artificial ones like shapes) based on stimulus perceptual similar-

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