The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences has collected nearly 500 entries on cognitive science, each written by a leading researcher in the field. It is a useful and timely book with many strong points. It will be an essential reference work for any student of the cognitive neuroscience. I have used it to learn, to browse and to teach. The Encyclopedia is available online; this feature is quite helpful and easy to use.
In this review I will focus on five entries in the encyclopedia, that bear closest connection with my own work; I found these articles immensely informative.
Hauser and Marler's entry reminds the cognitive scientist of several major findings from animal communication. These include the result from behavioral ecology that although animals communicate, they do not always tell the truth. Furthermore, few animals produce vocalizations that tell others about specific events (see social cognition entry from Cheney and Seyfarth below). Animals do not do what humans do, which is to combine speech elements into an infinite variety of meaningful sounds. Song birds show this recombination ability, but their recombinations lack meaning and are primarily affective signals. Nevertheless, the many common features shared with human language make bird song a great model for communication. Like humans, song birds are superb vocal learners. Both learn their vocal motor behavior early in life, with a strong dependence on hearing both the adults that they will imitate, as well as themselves as they practice. The similarities and differences between human and animal communication described in this entry show that animal models are an essential part of cognitive science.
Rauscheker's review of auditory physiology shows how complex sound stimuli are processed by the auditory system. The brains of animals like frogs, songbirds, owls and bats all show sensitivity to complex sounds. The key is that the complex sounds used in these neurophysiological studies have a clear behavioral context identified in ethological studies. Responses to other mammalian vocalizations (apart from bats), are only beginning to be better understood (e.g., the communication sounds of monkeys). At present, cognitive