Brendan O. McGonigle was a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 in Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. He received a BA (in 1961) and a PhD (in 1964) from Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...

. In 1964 he did his postdoc at Durham University

Durham University

The University of Durham, commonly known as Durham University, is a university in Durham, England. It was founded by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837...

, moving in 1965 to lecture in experimental psychology at Oxford University. Following a stint as an assistant professor and NIH Research Associate at the Animal Behaviour Lab, Pennsylvania State University

Pennsylvania State University

The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...

, he moved to the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 in 1969. Brendan died on 29 November 2007.

Brendan's main interest was in characterising the growth and dynamics of intelligent systems. Research on this involved comparative psychology

Comparative psychology

Comparative psychology generally refers to the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals. However, scientists from different disciplines do not always agree on this definition...

, developmental psychology

Developmental psychology

Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...

, robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

, and cognitive modelling, all integrated within one programme. Research with squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus), capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), and young children studied pre-linguistic competencies. Monkeys provided inspiration for robotic models of complex primate intelligence. A central focus was the search for cognitive tasks which could be used in animals and humans.

Brendan's work was borne from the animal learning culture of the 1960s, but he pioneered the study of more complex relational rule learning in animals by moving away from the simple two-choice discrimination paradigm characteristic of associationistic approaches to animal minds. A well known study with Margaret Chalmers published in Nature

Nature (journal)

Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

 adapted a test of transitive reasoning for monkeys and showed that monkeys were capable of performing on these tasks at comparable levels of success to young children. The authors argued that both species were evincing rational choice based on linear ordering of information and later confirmed this using reaction time measures.

In his research, Brendan was concerned to allow monkeys long-term learning opportunities comparable to that available for children, and so his subsequent work with Cebus apella was a long and staged programme in which the monkeys were trained to seriate by size and classify by shape and colour up to 12 objects on a touch screen – a level of ordering competence that only emerges in human development at around 6/7 years of age and had never before been demonstrated in a non-human species.

The sequences achieved by Cebus apella have significance for the evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of human language

Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

. Although the monkeys were trained on a core spine such as square, circle, triangle, they transferred to extended versions such as "touch all the stars, then all the triangles, then all the hexagons" with an ease that could not be predicted by simple association learning

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov...

. They also nested size relations within these classes, choosing for example large star, middle sized star, small star, large hexagon, middle sized hexagon, etc. At the end of their training the monkeys were able to simultaneously maintain 4 different sequences that randomly alternated on different trials: 9 stars ordered by size, 9 hexagons ordered by size and 9 triangles ordered by size, as well as a 9 item set composed of all three shapes – also ordered by size. This is the first example of the acquisition of a complex hierarchical structure by a non-human primate and has been cited by Hauser

Marc Hauser

Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior and animal cognition who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific...

and McDermott (2003) as a possible exception to the claim that only humans have "infinite productivity".