ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
After completing an undergraduate psychology course taught by Michael Colombo at the University of Otago in New Zealand, Damian Scarf was hooked on animal cognition. Colombo told Scarf how he and other behavioral researchers were demonstrating that nonhuman animals seemed to possess cognitive abilities that researchers had previously considered to be exclusively human. “Testing these human-unique abilities just seemed awesome, so I switched from zoology to psychology the following year,” Scarf recalls.
Scarf completed his PhD work in Colombo’s lab and is now a lecturer at the University of Otago, where he continues to test the ability of nonhuman animals to display traits supposedly unique to humans. Most of his work involves birds, which have repeatedly upended the concept of human uniqueness. For example, scientists ...
