Categories as paradigms for comparative cognition

Abstract

Forming categories is a basic cognitive operation allowing animals to attain concepts, i.e. to represent various classes of objects, natural or artificial, physical or social. Categories can also be formed about the relations holding among these objects, notably similarity and identity. Some of the cognitive processes involved in categorisation will be enumerated. Also, special reference will be made to a much neglected area of research, that of social representations. Here, animals conceive the natural class of their conspecifics as well as the relationships established between them in groups. Two types of social categories were mentioned: (1) intraspecies recognition including recognition of individual conspecifics; and (2) representation of dominance hierarchies and of their transitivity in linear orders.