A social history of the founding of the Conference on Comparative Cognition and the Comparative Cognition Society

Abstract

faculty members were encouraged to do likewise. However, in practice, faculty give 10-minute talks, or, less commonly, 20-minute talks. Other more pragmatic, but important, decisions dealt with providing snacks and drinks at the meetings and when to schedule sessions. Most important, the steering committee discussed what the meeting was going to be about. They decided that CO3 was to be about comparative cognition in the broadest sense, with encouragement to report on the standard laboratory species and on more naturally occurring species. By defining cognition broadly, they were able to avoid the squabbles then current between more behaviorally oriented and more cognitively oriented scientists. CO3 first met March 17–20, 1994, at the Holiday Inn on the Ocean in Melbourne. Slightly fewer than three dozen scientists attended, but CO3 was off to a promising start. The attendees liked the meeting, and more than half said they would attend often if not every year. In those early years, more pelicans attended, and more alcohol was consumed. Noise issues in the normal meeting rooms prompted the hotel to move us to a swank, oceanfront, two-story, glass-walled penthouse. For a time, the luxurious penthouse was perfect for meetings and great evening parties. But eventually rising room rates and noise from the Holiday Inn’s oceanfront entertainment drove CO3 a few miles north to the Hilton Hotel, which served CO3 well until the This memoir is a brief history of the founding of the Conference on Comparative Cognition and the Comparative Cognition Society. The text represents the best recollections of the authors, who together founded the Conference. In the 1980s, Ron Weisman visited Melbourne, Florida, regularly to enjoy the warm weather in March and to visit friends at Florida Tech. Over time, he began thinking about sharing the Melbourne experience with other comparative cognition scientists. He discussed the idea with Mark Bouton, Marcia Spetch, and Ed Wasserman in the late 1980s: it is probably no accident that all four taught on campuses that experience harsh winters. By the early 1990s, the group began planning the meetings in earnest. Together, all four became known as the steering committee—or “steers” for short. The steering committee began meeting as a group and in pairs over the next few years to plan the conference. They decided on a name (the Conference on Comparative Cognition), and Ed Wasserman provided the acronym, CO3. Suzy Bouton did the wonderful logo. The committee discussed the lengths of the talks (5, 10, and 20 minutes). Mark Bouton suggested including very short, 5-minute talks, borrowed from the Winter Conference on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Park City, Utah). At CO3, the 5-minute talks evolved into “spoken posters,” complete in themselves, practiced, polished, and informative. Graduate students were allowed to present these brief talks from the beginning, and Ronald G. Weisman