Comparative psychology is the scientific study of animal cognition and behavior from an evolutionary perspective.

This two-volume handbook presents the different aspects of comparative psychology -- behavior, cognition, learning, and neurophysiology -- in a balanced and exhaustive manner.

There are 80 chapters across the set, divided into nine parts.

History and Methods constitute the first two parts of the handbook. Key events and basic questions (and controversies) that have shaped the field as well as the methods used to make those questions empirically tractable are presented here.

The next three parts -- Adaptation/Evolution, Genes/Hormones, and Neural Substrate -- present the conceptual foundations for understanding the genesis of behavior and cognition both from a phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspective.

Finally, the next four parts (Behavior, Perception/Attention, Learning/Motivation, and Cognition/Emotion) are devoted to the core of comparative psychology today.
About the Author: Josep Call, PhD, is a professor of the evolutionary origins of mind in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland, and director and cofounder of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in the Leipzig Zoo in Leipzig, Germany. He received his BA in 1990 from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain, and his MA in 1995 and PhD in 1997 from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. From 1997 to 1999, he was a lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Liverpool in Liverpool, England. In 1999, he worked as a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. A comparative psychologist specializing in primate cognition and cognitive evolution, Dr. Call's research focuses on elucidating the cognitive processes underlying technical and social problem solving in animals, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the evolution of human and nonhuman cognition. He has published four books and more than 300 articles and book chapters on the behavior and cognition of great apes and other animals. He has been awarded the Irvine Memorial Medal and the Sheth Distinguished International Alumni Award, and has been elected a fellow of APA Division 6 (Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology), the Cognitive Science Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Comparative Psychology and serves on the editorial board of several other academic journals.