Animal cognition ≈ Animal cognition
View article
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are Open
What separates your mind from an animal's? Maybe you think it's your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future-all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet's preeminent species. But in r…
View article
Brain size predicts problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores Open
Significance Intelligence presents evolutionary biology with one of its greatest challenges. It has long been thought that species with relatively large brains for their body size are more intelligent. However, despite decades of research,…
View article
The evolution of general intelligence Open
The presence of general intelligence poses a major evolutionary puzzle, which has led to increased interest in its presence in nonhuman animals. The aim of this review is to critically evaluate this question and to explore the implications…
View article
The Power of a Positive Human–Animal Relationship for Animal Welfare Open
Domestic animals often seek and enjoy interacting with humans. Positive human-animal relationships can elicit positive emotions and other positive welfare outcomes. Nevertheless, our understanding of the underlying processes that govern th…
View article
Ravens attribute visual access to unseen competitors Open
Recent studies purported to demonstrate that chimpanzees, monkeys and corvids possess a basic Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states like seeing to others. However, these studies remain controversial because they share a co…
View article
The role of the hippocampus in approach-avoidance conflict decision-making: Evidence from rodent and human studies Open
The hippocampus (HPC) has been traditionally considered to subserve mnemonic processing and spatial cognition. Over the past decade, however, there has been increasing interest in its contributions to processes beyond these two domains. On…
View article
Numerical cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction Open
Honeybees learn to add or subtract one item from a set using color cues and can interpolate operations to a novel number.
View article
Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds Open
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These…
View article
The gut microbiome as a driver of individual variation in cognition and functional behaviour Open
Research into proximate and ultimate mechanisms of individual cognitive variation in animal populations is a rapidly growing field that incorporates physiological, behavioural and evolutionary investigations. Recent studies in humans and l…
View article
Ravens, New Caledonian crows and jackdaws parallel great apes in motor self-regulation despite smaller brains Open
Overriding motor impulses instigated by salient perceptual stimuli represent a fundamental inhibitory skill. Such motor self-regulation facilitates more rational behaviour, as it brings economy into the bodily interaction with the physical…
View article
Numerosity representations in crows obey the Weber–Fechner law Open
The ability to estimate number is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Based on the relative close phylogenetic relationship (and thus equivalent brain structures), non-verbal numerical representations in human and non-human primates …
View article
Brain size affects performance in a reversal-learning test Open
It has become increasingly clear that a larger brain can confer cognitive benefits. Yet not all of the numerous aspects of cognition seem to be affected by brain size. Recent evidence suggests that some more basic forms of cognition, for i…
View article
Unraveling the evolution of uniquely human cognition Open
A satisfactory account of human cognitive evolution will explain not only the psychological mechanisms that make our species unique, but also how, when, and why these traits evolved. To date, researchers have made substantial progress towa…
View article
Deciphering Decision Making: Variation in Animal Models of Effort- and Uncertainty-Based Choice Reveals Distinct Neural Circuitries Underlying Core Cognitive Processes Open
Maladaptive decision-making is increasingly recognized to play a significant role in numerous psychiatric disorders, such that therapeutics capable of ameliorating core impairments in judgment may be beneficial in a range of patient popula…
View article
Emotion Evaluation and Response Slowing in a Non-Human Primate: New Directions for Cognitive Bias Measures of Animal Emotion? Open
The cognitive bias model of animal welfare assessment is informed by studies with humans demonstrating that the interaction between emotion and cognition can be detected using laboratory tasks. A limitation of cognitive bias tasks is the a…
View article
Conserved Sequence Processing in Primate Frontal Cortex Open
An important aspect of animal perception and cognition is learning to recognize relationships between environmental events that predict others in time, a form of relational knowledge that can be assessed using sequence-learning paradigms. …
View article
Linking cognition with fitness in a wild primate: fitness correlates of problem-solving performance and spatial learning ability Open
Linking the cognitive performance of wild animals with fitness consequences is crucial for understanding evolutionary processes that shape individual variation in cognition. However, the few studies that have examined these links revealed …
View article
Replications in Comparative Cognition: What Should We Expect and How Can We Improve? Open
Direct replication studies follow an original experiment’s methods as closely as possible. They provide information about the reliability and validity of an original study’s findings. The present paper asks what comparative cognition shoul…
View article
When Meat Gets Personal, Animals’ Minds Matter Less Open
Why are many Westerners outraged by dog meat, but comfortable with pork? This is particularly puzzling, given strong evidence that both species are highly intelligent. We suggest that although people consider intelligence a key factor in d…
View article
Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions Open
Domestication has shaped the physiology and the behaviour of animals to better adapt to human environments. Therefore, human facial expressions may be highly informative for animals domesticated for working closely with people, such as dog…
View article
Experimental evidence of memory-based foraging decisions in a large wild mammal Open
Significance Understanding how animals respond to changes in resource availability is central to ecological research and to designing effective wildlife conservation and management strategies. To date, little research has been conducted on…
View article
Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication Open
Studies of animal communication are often assumed to provide the ‘royal road’ to understanding the evolution of human language. After all, language is the pre-eminent system of human communication: doesn't it make sense to search for its p…
View article
A comparison between wolves, Canis lupus, and dogs, Canis familiaris, in showing behaviour towards humans Open
Both human and nonhuman primates use imperative pointing to request a desired object from another individual. Gaze alternation often accompanies such pointing gestures, and in species that have no hands this can in itself function as imper…
View article
Two- and Three-Year-Olds Track a Single Meaning During Word Learning: Evidence for Propose-but-Verify Open
A child word-learning experiment is reported that examines 2- and 3-year-olds' ability to learn the meanings of novel words across multiple, referentially ambiguous, word occurrences. Children were told they were going on an animal safari …
View article
Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition Open
Behavioural flexibility is often treated as the gold standard of evidence for more sophisticated or complex forms of animal cognition, such as planning, metacognition and mindreading. However, the evidential link between behavioural flexib…
View article
When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants Open
Human brain size nearly quadrupled in the six million years since Homo last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but human brains are thought to have decreased in volume since the end of the last Ice Age. The timing and reason for th…
View article
Enhanced Selection of Assistance and Explosive Detection Dogs Using Cognitive Measures Open
Working dogs play a variety of important roles, ranging from assisting individuals with disabilities, to explosive and medical detection work. Despite widespread demand, only a subset of dogs bred and trained for these roles ultimately suc…
View article
Old and New Approaches to Animal Cognition: There Is Not “One Cognition” Open
Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses a…
View article
Optimistic and pessimistic biases: a primer for behavioural ecologists Open
To address the adaptive value of optimism/pessimism an operational definition is required. I define a behavioural decision as relatively optimistic if it is consistent with the animal having either, a higher expectation of reward, or a low…
View article
Representational specializations of the hippocampus in phylogenetic perspective Open
In a major evolutionary transition that occurred more than 520 million years ago, the earliest vertebrates adapted to a life of mobile, predatory foraging guided by distance receptors concentrated on their heads. Vision and olfaction serve…