Epidemiology is a tool used to identify and quantify risk factors that contribute to the state of health or disease. In addition, the maintenance of health and recognition of nonhuman animal welfare are both key principles of health management. Animal welfare and ethology provide important contributions to our ability to understand and improve health. As such, there can be a strong connection b...

TOATES, F. The interaction of cognitive and stimulus–response processes in the control of behaviour. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV 22(1) 59–83, 1998.—It is argued that both stimulus–response (S–R) and cognitive theories of learning and behaviour capture part of the truth, in that these terms involve two different types of process that are jointly responsible for the control of behaviour. The proposal t...

Many of us have been surprised at the unconventional decision of the Nobel Foundation to award this year’s prize ‘for Physiology or Medicine’ to three men who had until recently been regarded as ‘mere animal watchers’. Since at least Konrad Lorenz and I could not really be described as physiologists, we must conclude that our scientia amabilis is now being acknowledged as an integral part of th...

Species of Mind seeks primarily to establish the credentials of cognitive ethology as an exciting and above all respectable branch of scientific inquiry. Difficulties in achieving the aims of cognitive ethology are not downplayed, but it is argued that they can be overcome sufficiently to sustain an empirical research program. An important subgoal is the promotion of an interdisciplinary approa...

Human ethology, which was established on the basis of classical zooethology, can be an inspirational contribution to the study of human behavior. The study of behavior in natural conditions is stimulating as well as the primary interest of ethologists in such behavioral patterns showing evolutionary success and benefits and which are called inborn or innate. The extensive area of human behavior...

This report describes synthetic ethology, a scientific methodology in which we construct synthetic worlds in which synthetic agents evolve and become coupled to their environment. First we review the motivations for synthetic ethology as an experimental methodology and explain how it can be used to investigate intentionality and meaning, and the mechanisms from which they emerge, with an especi...