Learning, Memory, and Cognition: Animal Perspectives 28

• Cognition is the integrating process that utilizes many different forms of memory, creates intemal represen­ tations of the experienced world and provides a ref­ erence for expecting the future of the animal's own actions. It thus allows the animal to decide between different options in reference to the expected outcome of its potential actions. All these processes occur as intrinsic operations of the nervous system, and pro­ vide an implicit form of knowledge for controlling behavior. None of these processes need to and cer­ tainly will not become explicit within the nervous systems of many animal species (in particular inverte­ brates and lower vertebrates), but such processes must be assumed to also exist in these animal species. It is the goal of comparative animal cognition to relate the complexity of the nervous system to the level of inter­ nal processing. Neural integration processes are manifold and span a large range of possibilities all of which can be viewed from an evolutionary perspective as adapta­ tions to the specific demands posed by the environ­ ment to the particular species. At one extreme one can find organisms dominated by their inherited informa­ tion (phylogenetic memory) developing only minimal experience-based adaptation. At the other extreme, phylogenetic memory merely provides a broad frame­ work, and experience-based memory dominates.