Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

This encyclopedia, reflecting one of the fastest growing fields in evolutionary psychology, is a comprehensive examination of the key areas in animal cognition. It will serve as a complementary resource to the handbooks and journals that have emerged in the last decade on this topic, and will be a useful resource for student and researcher alike. With comprehensive coverage of this field, key concepts will be explored. These include social cognition, prey and predator detection, habitat selection, mating and parenting, learning and perception. Attention is also given to animal-human co-evolution and interaction, as well as metacognition and consciousness. Entries are tailored to the importance of the individual topic and the amount of empirical evidence that is available. All entries are under the purview of acknowledged experts in the field.

Jennifer Vonk received her Ph.D. in Comparative Psychology from York University in 2002, her M.A. in psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1998 and her B.A. in psychology from McMaster University in 1994. She completed a post-doc at the University of Louisiana in 2005 and is now an Associate Professor in Psychology at Oakland University, where she directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Origins (www.jennifervonk.com). Vonk has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and edited chapters and co-edited a volume on Comparative Evolutionary Psychology. Her work has been cited almost 1500 times. She currently serves on several editorial boards for journals in the field of Animal Behavior and Cognition. Her work focuses broadly on the question of similarities and differences in the cognitive systems of various distantly-related animals, such as non-human primates, carnivores, and chiropterans.

Todd K. Shackelford received his Ph.D. in evolutionary psychology in 1997 from the University of Texas–Austin, his M.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1995, and his B.A. in psychology from the University of New Mexico in 1993. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University (http://www.oakland.edu/psychology) in Rochester, Michigan, where he is Co-Director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab (www.ToddKShackelford.com). He led the founding of new Ph.D. and M.S. programs (http://www.oakland.edu/psychology/grad/), which launched in 2012. Shackelford has published around 300 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and has edited 14 volumes, and his work has been cited nearly 10,000 times. Much of Shackelford’s research addresses sexual conflict between men and women, with a special focus on testing hypotheses derived from sperm competition theory. Since 2006, Shackelford has served as editor of Evolutionary Psychology.