Brendan McGonigle

Who was Brendan McGonigle?

Brendan O. McGonigle was a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He received a BA and a PhD from Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1964 he did his postdoc at Durham University, 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, he moved to the University of Edinburgh 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, developmental psychology, robotics, and cognitive modelling, all integrated within one programme. Research with squirrel monkeys, capuchin monkeys, 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 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.