Journal articles: 'Cognition in animals'

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Nicol, C. J. "Farm animal cognition." Animal Science 62, no. 3 (June 1996): 375–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1357729800014934.

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AbstractAlthough there may be task-specific differences in performance between wild and domestic animals, there is no evidence for any generally reduced cognitive capacity in domestic animals. It is not possible to compare intelligence between species or breeds without recognizing the contribution of differences in attention and motivation, and domestic animals often perform better on learning tasks than wild animals because they are less fearful. Considerable flexibility and complexity in behaviour can arise from context-specific decisions that may not require learning. Examples include alarm calling and maternal behaviour in chickens. However, the majority of intelligent behaviour shown by farm animals is dominated by learned associations, sometimes in response to remarkably subtle cues. Seemingly straightforward learning abilities may result in surprising emergent properties. An understanding of these properties may enable us to investigate how farm animals interact socially, and whether they form concepts. Other abilities, such as imitation and the re-organization of spatial information, do not appear to depend on associative learning. The study offarm animal cognition tells us little about the issue of animal consciousness but, none the less, plays an important role in the animal welfare debate. The types of cognitive abilities animals have provide clues as to the types of situations in which (given the benefit of the doubt) they might suffer.

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Pennisi, E. "ANIMAL COGNITION: Social Animals Prove Their Smarts." Science 312, no. 5781 (June 23, 2006): 1734–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.312.5781.1734.

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Croney, C. C., B. Gardner, and S. Baggot. "Beyond Animal Husbandry." Essays in Philosophy 5, no. 2 (2004): 391–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/eip20045213.

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Concerns about the welfare of agricultural animals in corporate or “factory farming” systems are growing. Increasingly, it is suggested that modem farm animal production practices are morally objectionable, causing physical and mental suffering to animals. Such criticisms are premised on beliefs about the mental capacities of farm animals that are not wholly supported by scientific evidence, for little is known about farm animal cognition. Some animal scientists, realizing that concerns about the treatment of agricultural animals cannot be addressed in absence of knowledge about farm animal mentality, have begun cognitive studies of farm animals. Subsequently, several ethical problems have emerged. In this paper it is argued that while farm animal cognition studies are needed, scientists must consider the moral problems and implications of the research, and must devise empirically testable hypotheses about those aspects of cognitive behavior that are relevant to discussions about moral treatment of farm animals.

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Boissy, A., C. Arnould, E. Chaillou, L. Désiré, C. Duvaux-Ponter, L. Greiveldinger, C. Leterrier, et al. "Emotions and cognition: a new approach to animal welfare." Animal Welfare 16, S1 (May 2007): 37–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0962728600031717.

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AbstractThe concept of quality of life in animals is closely associated with the concepts of animal sentience and animal welfare. It reflects a positive approach that inquires what animals like or prefer doing. The assessment of farm animal welfare requires a good understanding of the animals' affective experience, including their emotions. However, affective experience in animals is difficult to measure because of the absence of verbal communication. Recent studies in the field of cognitive psychology have shown that affective experience can be investigated without using verbal communication by examination of the interactions between emotions and cognition. On the one hand, appraisal theories provide a conceptual framework which suggests that emotions in humans are triggered by a cognitive process whereby the situation is evaluated on a limited number of elementary criteria such as familiarity and predictability. We have applied these appraisal theories to develop an experimental approach for studying the elementary criteria used by farm animals to evaluate their environment and the combinations of those criteria that trigger emotions. On the other hand, an increasing body of research, first in humans and then in other animals, suggests that emotions also influence cognitive processes by modifying attention, memory and judgement in a short- or long-term manner. Cognitive processes could therefore be manipulated and measured to provide new insights into how not only emotions but also more persistent affective states can be assessed in animals. Further work based on these cognitive approaches will offer new paradigms for improving our understanding of animal welfare, thus contributing to ‘a life of high quality’ in animals.

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Raby, C. R., and N. S. Clayton. "Prospective cognition in animals." Behavioural Processes 80, no. 3 (March 2009): 314–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2008.12.005.

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Kirkwood, J. K., and R. Hubrecht. "Animal Consciousness, Cognition and Welfare." Animal Welfare 10, S1 (February 2001): S5—S17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0962728600023472.

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AbstractThe level of priority and resource given to the care of organisms is influenced by beliefs and understanding about their capacities for conscious awareness. Variation in attitudes to animal welfare around the world today is partly a reflection of this. Improved understanding of the range of phenomena of which animals may be conscious is likely to lead to greater global consensus about the importance of high standards of animal welfare. This is a matter of current relevance. In the global free market there is a danger that efforts in one country to raise standards for farm or laboratory animals will be compromised by competition from others which employ cheaper, less welfare-friendly systems. Scientific developments which inform us about animals’ capacities for pleasant and unpleasant feelings will play an important role in the development of global agreement about animal welfare standards. Deciding which animals might have the capacity for consciousness, and thus for suffering, and of what they might be conscious, are fundamental issues which set boundaries to the ranges of species to be given basic or special forms of welfare protection. In practice, such lines have to be drawn and it is crucial that they are drawn in the right place. This is a difficult but essential task and society looks to scientists for guidance on the matter. There have been many developments in recent years in scientific approaches to the study of consciousness in animals which are pertinent to this debate.

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Smith, J. David, and David A. Washburn. "Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition by Animals." Current Directions in Psychological Science 14, no. 1 (February 2005): 19–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00327.x.

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Humans have the capacity to feel consciously uncertain and to know when they do not know. These feelings and responses ground the research literature on uncertainty monitoring and metacognition (i.e., cognition about cognition). It is a natural and important question whether nonhuman animals share this sophisticated cognitive capacity. We summarize current research that confirms animals' capacity for uncertainty monitoring. This research includes perception and memory paradigms and monkey, dolphin, and human participants. It contains some of the strongest existing performance similarities between humans and other animals. There is a strong isomorphism between the uncertainty-monitoring capacities of humans and animals. Indeed, the results show that animals have functional features of or parallels to human metacognition and human conscious cognition.

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Wasserman, Edward A. "Comparative Cognition: Toward a General Understanding of Cognition in Behavior." Psychological Science 4, no. 3 (May 1993): 156–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00480.x.

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Human and nonhuman animals alike must adjust to complex and ever-changing circumstances if they are to survive and reproduce. Advanced neural mechanisms enable animals to remember the past, to act in the present, and to plan for the future. Exploring the species generality of cognitive processes in behavior is central to the field of comparative cognition. A comparative perspective may not only broaden but also deepen our understanding of cognition—both in human and in nonhuman animals.

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TANAKA, MASAYUKI. "Comparative cognition in zoo animals." Japanese Journal of Animal Psychology 66, no. 1 (2016): 53–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2502/janip.66.1.8.

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Burmeister, Sabrina S., and Yuxiang Liu. "Integrative Comparative Cognition: Can Neurobiology and Neurogenomics Inform Comparative Analyses of Cognitive Phenotype?" Integrative and Comparative Biology 60, no. 4 (August 19, 2020): 925–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa113.

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Synopsis A long-standing question in animal behavior is what are the patterns and processes that shape the evolution of cognition? One effective way to address this question is to study cognitive abilities in a broad spectrum of animals. While comparative psychologists have traditionally focused on a narrow range of organisms, today they may work with any number of species, from frogs to birds or bees. This broader range of study species has greatly enriched our understanding of the diversity of cognitive processes among animals. Yet, this diversity has highlighted the fundamental challenge of comparing cognitive processes across animals. An analysis of the neural and molecular mechanisms of cognition may be necessary to solve this problem. The goal of our symposium was to bring together speakers studying a range of species to gain a broadly integrative perspective on cognition while at the same time considering the potentially important role of neurobiology and genomics in addressing the difficult problem of comparing cognition across species. For example, work by MaBouDi et al. indicates that neural constraints on computing power may impact the cognitive processes underlying numerical discrimination in bees. A presentation by Lara LaDage demonstrated how neurobiology can be used to better understand cognition and its evolution in reptiles while Edwards et al. identify the cerebellum as potentially important in the performance of the complex process of nest building. We see that molecular approaches highlight the contributions of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to cognitive phenotype across vertebrates while, at the same time, identifying the genes and cellular processes that may contribute to evolution of cognition. The potentially important role of neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity emerge clearly from such studies. Still unanswered is the question of whether molecular tools will contribute to our ability to discriminate convergent/parallel evolution from homology in the evolution of cognitive phenotype.

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Olton, D. S., A. L. Markowska, K. Pang, S. Golski, M. L. Voytko, and L. K. Gorman. "Comparative cognition and assessment of cognitive processes in animals." Behavioural Pharmacology 3, no. 4 (August 1992): 307???318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/00008877-199208000-00006.

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Cheng, Ken. "Cognition Beyond Representation: Varieties of Situated Cognition in Animals." Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 13 (2018): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3819/ccbr.2018.130001.

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Ginsburg, Simona, and Eva Jablonka. "Evolutionary transitions in learning and cognition." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376, no. 1821 (February 8, 2021): 20190766. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0766.

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We define a cognitive system as a system that can learn, and adopt an evolutionary-transition-oriented framework for analysing different types of neural cognition. This enables us to classify types of cognition and point to the continuities and discontinuities among them. The framework we use for studying evolutionary transitions in learning capacities focuses on qualitative changes in the integration, storage and use of neurally processed information. Although there are always grey areas around evolutionary transitions, we recognize five major neural transitions, the first two of which involve animals at the base of the phylogenetic tree: (i) the evolutionary transition from learning in non-neural animals to learning in the first neural animals; (ii) the transition to animals showing limited, elemental associative learning, entailing neural centralization and primary brain differentiation; (iii) the transition to animals capable of unlimited associative learning, which, on our account, constitutes sentience and entails hierarchical brain organization and dedicated memory and value networks; (iv) the transition to imaginative animals that can plan and learn through selection among virtual events; and (v) the transition to human symbol-based cognition and cultural learning. The focus on learning provides a unifying framework for experimental and theoretical studies of cognition in the living world. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Basal cognition: multicellularity, neurons and the cognitive lens’.

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Alwishah, Ahmed. "AVICENNA ON ANIMAL SELF-AWARENESS, COGNITION AND IDENTITY." Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (February 2, 2016): 73–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0957423915000120.

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AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive and systematic study of Avicenna's account of animal self-awareness and cognition. In the first part, I explain how, for Avicenna, in contrast to human self-awareness, animal self-awareness is taken to be indirect, mixed-up (makhlūṭ), and an intermittent awareness. In his view, animal self-awareness is provided by the faculty of estimation (wahm); hence, in the second part, I explore the cognitive role of the faculty of estimation in animals, and how that relates to self-awareness. The faculty of estimation, according to Avicenna, serves to distinguish one's body and its parts from external objects, and plays a role in connecting the self to its perceptual activities. It follows that animal self-awareness, unlike human self-awareness, is essentially connected to the body. In the third part of the paper, I show that, while Avicenna denies animals awareness of their self-awareness, he explicitly affirms that animals can grasp their individual identity, but, unlike humans, do so incidentally, as part of their perceptual awareness.

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Miklósi, Á., J. Topál, and V. Csányi. "Dog Consciousness: Does Human Companionship Make a Difference?" Animal Welfare 10, S1 (February 2001): S244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0962728600023745.

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There is growing interest in exploring the cognitive abilities of animals, but the number of species studied is still very limited. Here, we would like to suggest that the domestic dog offers a very good example for investigating animal cognition.

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Gamzu, E. R., and S. I. Gracon. "Drug Improvement of Cognition : Hope and Reality." Psychiatry and Psychobiology 3, S2 (1988): 115s—123s. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0767399x00002121.

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SummaryRecent research aimed at discovering and developing new drugs for diseases of cognition focuses heavily on Alzheimer’s disease and emphasizes mechanistic/biochemical approaches. Originally, research was based on a pragmatic search for compounds that would protect animals front disruptors of learning and memory. A series of compounds called nootropics do protect animals against these disruptions and offer hope that cognitive deficits may be amenable to pharmacological treatment. However, clinical development of these compounds is complicated by a number of factors. Among these is the poor correlation between animal models of cognitive loss and clinical disease states, a notable exception being the amnesic effects of benzodiazepines. Moreover, the inverted U-shaped dose-response function obtained in animal models and the lack of standard clinical outcome measures further complicate the development process. Tests that are beginning to gain acceptance as “standards” need to be characterized in terms of their validity, variability, and stability. There is a dearth of normative, especially longitudinal, data on cognitive decline. However, the great efforts being made in basic and applied research warrant cautious optimism.

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Shettleworth, Sara J. "Modularity, comparative cognition and human uniqueness." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1603 (October 5, 2012): 2794–802. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0211.

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Darwin's claim ‘that the difference in mind between man and the higher animals … is certainly one of degree and not of kind’ is at the core of the comparative study of cognition. Recent research provides unprecedented support for Darwin's claim as well as new reasons to question it, stimulating new theories of human cognitive uniqueness. This article compares and evaluates approaches to such theories. Some prominent theories propose sweeping domain-general characterizations of the difference in cognitive capabilities and/or mechanisms between adult humans and other animals. Dual-process theories for some cognitive domains propose that adult human cognition shares simple basic processes with that of other animals while additionally including slower-developing and more explicit uniquely human processes. These theories are consistent with a modular account of cognition and the ‘core knowledge’ account of children's cognitive development. A complementary proposal is that human infants have unique social and/or cognitive adaptations for uniquely human learning. A view of human cognitive architecture as a mosaic of unique and species-general modular and domain-general processes together with a focus on uniquely human developmental mechanisms is consistent with modern evolutionary-developmental biology and suggests new questions for comparative research.

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Bräuer, Juliane, Daniel Hanus, Simone Pika, Russell Gray, and Natalie Uomini. "Old and New Approaches to Animal Cognition: There Is Not “One Cognition”." Journal of Intelligence 8, no. 3 (July 2, 2020): 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence8030028.

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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 assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally “smart” species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term “cognition” has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not “one cognition”. Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which—although always at the forefront of biology—has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model.

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McFarland, David. "Defining motivation and cognition in animals." International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5, no. 2 (January 1991): 153–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02698599108573387.

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Maestripieri, Dario. "Comparing cognition in animals, and researchers." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5, no. 10 (October 2001): 452–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01760-5.

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Roberts, William A. "Evidence for future cognition in animals." Learning and Motivation 43, no. 4 (November 2012): 169–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lmot.2012.05.005.

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Keeler, J. F., and T. W. Robbins. "Translating cognition from animals to humans." Biochemical Pharmacology 81, no. 12 (June 2011): 1356–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bcp.2010.12.028.

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Pritting, Shannon. "Book Review: How Animals Think and Feel: An Introduction to Non-Human Psychology." Reference & User Services Quarterly 56, no. 4 (June 21, 2017): 304. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.56.4.304b.

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This affordable single-volume work is the first book by Dr. Ken Cheng of McQuarie University, who has published many journal articles on animal behavior on a variety of species in the past thirty years. Cheng’s experience as an accomplished researcher and professor is evident in his readable, well-researched, and entertaining writing. How Animals Think and Feel features nine chapters that focus on topics related to animal cognition and emotions. In addition, there are nine case studies of animals that reflect a diverse representation of animals, from jumping spiders to apes, with a concluding chapter putting human cognition and emotion into the context of animal behavior.

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Torres, Jorge. "Animal Ethics Based on Friendship: An Aristotelian Perspective." Journal of Animal Ethics 12, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 76–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/21601267.12.1.08.

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Abstract This article examines Aristotle's views concerning the possibility of friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals. The suggestion that he denies this possibility is rejected. I reassess the textual evidence adduced by scholars in support of this reading, while adding new material for discussion. Central to the traditional reading is the assumption that animals, in Aristotle's view, cannot be friends in virtue of their cognitive limitations. I argue that Aristotle's account of animal cognition is perfectly consistent with the possibility of friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals.

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Lehto, Otto. "Studying the cognitive states of animals: Epistemology, ethology and ethics." Sign Systems Studies 37, no. 3/4 (December 1, 2009): 369–422. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sss.2009.37.3-4.02.

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The question of cognitive endowment in animals has been fiercely debated in the scientific community during the last couple of decades (for example, in cognitive ethology and behaviourism), and indeed, all throughout the long history of natural philosophy (from Plato and Aristotle, via Descartes, to Darwin). The scientific quest for an empirical, evolutionary account of the development and emergence of cognition has met with many philosophical objections, blind alleys and epistemological quandaries. I will argue that we are dealing with conflicting philosophical world views as well as conflicting empirical paradigms of research. After looking at some examples from the relevant literature of animal studies to elucidate the nature of the conflicts that arise, I propose, in strict Darwinian orthodoxy, that cognitive endowments in nature are subject to the sort of continuum and gradation that natural selection of fit variant forms tends to generate. Somewhere between the myth of “free” humans and the myth of “behaviourally conditioned” animals lies the reality of animal behaviour and cognition. In the end, I hope to have softened up some of those deep-seated philosophical problems (and many quasi-problems) that puzzle and dazzle laymen, scientists and philosophers alike in their quest for knowledge about the natural world.

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Carere, Claudio, and Charles Locurto. "Interaction between animal personality and animal cognition." Current Zoology 57, no. 4 (August 1, 2011): 491–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/czoolo/57.4.491.

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Abstract The study of animal personality has attracted considerable attention, as it has revealed a number of similarities in personality between humans and several nonhuman species. At the same time the adaptive value and evolutionary maintenance of different personalities are the subject of debate. Since Pavlov’s work on dogs, students of comparative cognition have been aware that animals display vast individual differences on cognitive tasks, and that these differences may not be entirely accounted for differences in cognitive abilities. Here, we argue that personality is an important source of variation that may affect cognitive performance and we hypothesise mutual influences between personality and cognition across an individual’s lifespan. In particular, we suggest that: 1) personality profiles may be markers of different cognitive styles; 2) success or failure in cognitive tasks could affect different personalities differently; 3) ontogenetic changes of personality profiles could be reflected in changes in cognitive performance. The study of such interplay has implications in animal welfare as well as in neuroscience and in translational medicine.

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ANDREWS, KRISTIN. "Naïve Normativity: The Social Foundation of Moral Cognition." Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, no. 1 (2020): 36–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2019.30.

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AbstractTo answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: (1) the ability to identify agents, (2) sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, (3) the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and (4) responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique.

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Emery, Nathan J., and Nicola S. Clayton. "Imaginative scrub-jays, causal rooks, and a liberal application of Occam's aftershave." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, no. 2 (April 2008): 134–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x08003609.

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AbstractWe address the claim that nonhuman animals do not represent unobservable states, based on studies of physical cognition by rooks and social cognition by scrub-jays. In both cases, the most parsimonious explanation for the results is counter to the reinterpretation hypothesis. We suggest that imagination and prospection can be investigated in animals and included in models of cognitive architecture.

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Mendl, M., and ES Paul. "Consciousness, emotion and animal welfare: insights from cognitive science." Animal Welfare 13, S1 (February 2004): S17—S25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0962728600014330.

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AbstractThe assumption that animals are conscious and capable of experiencing negative sensations and emotions is at the core of most people's concerns about animal welfare. Investigation of this central assumption should be one goal of animal welfare science. We argue that theory and techniques from cognitive science offer promising ways forward. Evidence for the existence of conscious and non-conscious cognitive processing in humans has inspired scientists to search for comparable processes in animals. In studies of metacognition and blindsight, some species show behaviour that has functional parallels with human conscious cognitive processing. Although unable to definitively answer the question of whether the animals are conscious, these studies provide fresh insights, and some could be adapted for domestic animals. They mark a departure from the search for cognitive complexity as an indicator of consciousness, which is based on questionable assumptions linking the two. Accurate assessment of animal emotion is crucial in animal welfare research, and cognitive science offers novel approaches that address some limitations of current measures. Knowledge of the relationship between cognition and emotion in humans generates a priori frameworks for interpreting traditional physiological and behavioural indicators of animal emotion, and provides new measures (eg cognitive bias) that gauge positive as well as negative emotions. Conditioning paradigms can be used to enable animals to indicate their emotional state through operant responses. Although evidence for animal consciousness and emotion will necessarily be indirect, insights from cognitive science promise further advances in our understanding of this fundamentally important area in animal welfare science.

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Greggor, Alison L., Oded Berger-Tal, and Daniel T. Blumstein. "The Rules of Attraction: The Necessary Role of Animal Cognition in Explaining Conservation Failures and Successes." Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 51, no. 1 (November 2, 2020): 483–503. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-103212.

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Integrating knowledge and principles of animal behavior into wildlife conservation and management has led to some concrete successes but has failed to improve conservation outcomes in other cases. Many conservation interventions involve attempts to either attract or repel animals, which we refer to as approach/avoidance issues. These attempts can be reframed as issues of manipulating the decisions animals make, which are driven by their perceptual abilities and attentional biases, as well as the value animals attribute to current stimuli and past learned experiences. These processes all fall under the umbrella of animal cognition. Here, we highlight rules that emerge when considering approach/avoidance conservation issues through the lens of cognitive-based management. For each rule, we review relevant conservation successes and failures to better predict the conditions in which behavior can be manipulated, and we suggest how to avoid future failures.

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Zacks, Oryan, Simona Ginsburg, and Eva Jablonka. "The Futures of the Past The Evolution of Imaginative Animals." Journal of Consciousness Studies 29, no. 3 (March 31, 2022): 29–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.53765/20512201.29.3.029.

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We discuss the evolution of imagination in vertebrate animals within the framework of an evolutionary-transition approach. We define imaginative consciousness and the cognitive architecture that constitutes it and argue that the evolution of full-fledged imaginative consciousness that enables planning can be regarded as a major transition in the evolution of cognition. We explore the distribution and scope of a core capacity of imaginative cognition in non-human vertebrates — episodic-like memory (ELM) — by examining its behavioural manifestations as well as the organization and connectivity of the hippocampus, a central hub of episodic memory processes in vertebrates. Although the data are limited, we conclude that ELM evolved in parallel several times through the enrichment of minimal consciousness capacities, that there is a general correspondence between enhanced behavioural capacities and the size and complexity of the hippocampus during vertebrate evolution, and that the evolution of prospective, planning-enabling imagination is a major transition in cognition and consciousness.

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Caracciolo, Marco. "Flocking Together: Collective Animal Minds in Contemporary Fiction." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 135, no. 2 (March 2020): 239–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.2.239.

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The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

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Skelhorn, John, and Candy Rowe. "Cognition and the evolution of camouflage." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 283, no. 1825 (February 24, 2016): 20152890. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2890.

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Camouflage is one of the most widespread forms of anti-predator defence and prevents prey individuals from being detected or correctly recognized by would-be predators. Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in both the evolution of prey camouflage patterns, and in understanding animal cognition in a more ecological context. However, these fields rarely collide, and the role of cognition in the evolution of camouflage is poorly understood. Here, we review what we currently know about the role of both predator and prey cognition in the evolution of prey camouflage, outline why cognition may be an important selective pressure driving the evolution of camouflage and consider how studying the cognitive processes of animals may prove to be a useful tool to study the evolution of camouflage, and vice versa. In doing so, we highlight that we still have a lot to learn about the role of cognition in the evolution of camouflage and identify a number of avenues for future research.

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CARRUTHERS, PETER. "Meta-cognition in Animals: A Skeptical Look." Mind & Language 23, no. 1 (January 14, 2008): 58–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00329.x.

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Cook, Robert G. "The Experimental Analysis of Cognition in Animals." Psychological Science 4, no. 3 (May 1993): 174–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00483.x.

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The origins and current status of comparative cognitive psychology are examined. Great strides have been made in the last 20 years, but two problems are identified as obstacles to future progress. One is the very limited number of species studied by comparative cognitive psychologists. The second is the conflict between the increasing use of complex stimulus discriminations and the need for precise stimulus control in animal experiments. An expanded examination of more species as selected by phylogenetic and ecological considerations and an unwavering demand for the experimental identification of the controlling features of complex discriminations are suggested as solutions to these difficulties.

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Cunningham, Clare. "Tool Use in Animals. Cognition and Ecology." Animal Behaviour 86, no. 5 (November 2013): 1107–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.08.007.

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Jos, Prickaerts. "S.5.1 - TESTING COGNITION ENHANCERS IN ANIMALS." Behavioural Pharmacology 24 (October 2013): e5-e6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.fbp.0000434700.53518.5c.

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Streiffer, Robert. "Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-Level Utilitarianism." Environmental Ethics 38, no. 2 (2016): 249–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics201638222.

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Moss, Justin. "Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism." Ethics, Policy & Environment 18, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 225–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2015.1072316.

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Perlovsky, Leonid. "Emotions of “higher” cognition." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35, no. 3 (May 23, 2012): 157–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x11001555.

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AbstractThe target article by Lindquist et al. considers discrete emotions. This commentary argues that these are but a minor part of human emotional abilities, unifying us with animals. Uniquely human emotions are aesthetic emotions related to the need for the knowledge of “high” cognition, including emotions of the beautiful, cognitive dissonances, and musical emotions. This commentary touches on their cognitive functions and origins.

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Ismail, Maznah, Abdulsamad Alsalahi, Musheer Abdulwahid Aljaberi, Ramlah Mohamad Ibrahim, Faizah Abu Bakar, and Aini Ideris. "Efficacy of Edible Bird’s Nest on Cognitive Functions in Experimental Animal Models: A Systematic Review." Nutrients 13, no. 3 (March 23, 2021): 1028. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu13031028.

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Edible bird’s nest (EBN) is constructed from saliva of swiftlets birds and consumed largely by Southeast and East Asians for its nutritional value and anti-aging properties. Although the neuroprotection of EBN in animals has been reported, there has not been yet systemically summarized. Thus, this review systemically outlined the evidence of the neuroprotective activity of EBN in modulating the cognitive functions of either healthy or with induced-cognitive dysfunction animals as compared to placebos. The related records from 2010 to 2020 were retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and ScienceDirect using pre-specified keywords. The relevant records to the effect of EBN on cognition were selected according to the eligibility criteria and these studies underwent appraisal for the risk of bias. EBN improved the cognitive functions of induced-cognitive dysfunction and enhanced the cognitive performance of healthy animals as well as attenuated the neuroinflammations and neuro-oxidative stress in the hippocampus of these animals. Malaysian EBN could improve the cognitive functions of experimental animals as a treatment in induced cognitive dysfunction, a nutritional cognitive-enhancing agent in offspring and a prophylactic conservative effect on cognition against exposure to subsequent noxious cerebral accidents in a dose-depended manner through attenuating neuroinflammation and neuro-oxidative stress. This systemic review did not proceed meta-analysis.

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Poirier, Marc-Antoine, Dovid Y. Kozlovsky, Julie Morand-Ferron, and Vincent Careau. "How general is cognitive ability in non-human animals? A meta-analytical and multi-level reanalysis approach." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 287, no. 1940 (December 9, 2020): 20201853. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1853.

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General intelligence has been a topic of high interest for over a century. Traditionally, research on general intelligence was based on principal component analyses and other dimensionality reduction approaches. The advent of high-speed computing has provided alternative statistical tools that have been used to test predictions of human general intelligence. In comparison, research on general intelligence in non-human animals is in its infancy and still relies mostly on factor-analytical procedures. Here, we argue that dimensionality reduction, when incorrectly applied, can lead to spurious results and limit our understanding of ecological and evolutionary causes of variation in animal cognition. Using a meta-analytical approach, we show, based on 555 bivariate correlations, that the average correlation among cognitive abilities is low ( r = 0.185; 95% CI: 0.087–0.287), suggesting relatively weak support for general intelligence in animals. We then use a case study with relatedness (genetic) data to demonstrate how analysing traits using mixed models, without dimensionality reduction, provides new insights into the structure of phenotypic variance among cognitive traits, and uncovers genetic associations that would be hidden otherwise. We hope this article will stimulate the use of alternative tools in the study of cognition and its evolution in animals.

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Muñoz-Moreno, Emma, Raúl Tudela, Xavier López-Gil, and Guadalupe Soria. "Brain connectivity during Alzheimer’s disease progression and its cognitive impact in a transgenic rat model." Network Neuroscience 4, no. 2 (January 2020): 397–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00126.

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The research of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in its early stages and its progression till symptomatic onset is essential to understand the pathology and investigate new treatments. Animal models provide a helpful approach to this research, since they allow for controlled follow-up during the disease evolution. In this work, transgenic TgF344-AD rats were longitudinally evaluated starting at 6 months of age. Every 3 months, cognitive abilities were assessed by a memory-related task and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was acquired. Structural and functional brain networks were estimated and characterized by graph metrics to identify differences between the groups in connectivity, its evolution with age, and its influence on cognition. Structural networks of transgenic animals were altered since the earliest stage. Likewise, aging significantly affected network metrics in TgF344-AD, but not in the control group. In addition, while the structural brain network influenced cognitive outcome in transgenic animals, functional network impacted how control subjects performed. TgF344-AD brain network alterations were present from very early stages, difficult to identify in clinical research. Likewise, the characterization of aging in these animals, involving structural network reorganization and its effects on cognition, opens a window to evaluate new treatments for the disease.

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Spelke, Elizabeth S., and Sang Ah Lee. "Core systems of geometry in animal minds." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1603 (October 5, 2012): 2784–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0210.

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Research on humans from birth to maturity converges with research on diverse animals to reveal foundational cognitive systems in human and animal minds. The present article focuses on two such systems of geometry. One system represents places in the navigable environment by recording the distance and direction of the navigator from surrounding, extended surfaces. The other system represents objects by detecting the shapes of small-scale forms. These two systems show common signatures across animals, suggesting that they evolved in distant ancestral species. As children master symbolic systems such as maps and language, they come productively to combine representations from the two core systems of geometry in uniquely human ways; these combinations may give rise to abstract geometric intuitions. Studies of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic sources of abstract geometry therefore are illuminating of both human and animal cognition. Research on animals brings simpler model systems and richer empirical methods to bear on the analysis of abstract concepts in human minds. In return, research on humans, relating core cognitive capacities to symbolic abilities, sheds light on the content of representations in animal minds.

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George, Adam J., and Sarah L. Bolt. "Livestock cognition: stimulating the minds of farm animals to improve welfare and productivity." Livestock 26, no. 4 (July 2, 2021): 202–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/live.2021.26.4.202.

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Historically, farm animal cognition has not always been considered on commercial enterprises, but it has emerged as an important aspect of managing livestock to enhance welfare and increase productivity. The aim of this review is to summarise literature on the subject of cognition in livestock and discuss techniques to stimulate the minds of animals to enhance welfare practices on farm.

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Piantadosi, Steven T., and Jessica F. Cantlon. "True Numerical Cognition in the Wild." Psychological Science 28, no. 4 (March 7, 2017): 462–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797616686862.

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Cognitive and neural research over the past few decades has produced sophisticated models of the representations and algorithms underlying numerical reasoning in humans and other animals. These models make precise predictions for how humans and other animals should behave when faced with quantitative decisions, yet primarily have been tested only in laboratory tasks. We used data from wild baboons’ troop movements recently reported by Strandburg-Peshkin, Farine, Couzin, and Crofoot (2015) to compare a variety of models of quantitative decision making. We found that the decisions made by these naturally behaving wild animals rely specifically on numerical representations that have key homologies with the psychophysics of human number representations. These findings provide important new data on the types of problems human numerical cognition was designed to solve and constitute the first robust evidence of true numerical reasoning in wild animals.

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Sevillano, Verónica, and Susan T. Fiske. "Animals as Social Objects." European Psychologist 21, no. 3 (July 2016): 206–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000268.

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Abstract. Nonhuman animals are typically excluded from the scope of social psychology. This article presents animals as social objects – targets of human social responses – overviewing the similarities and differences with human targets. The focus here is on perceiving animal species as social groups. Reflecting the two fundamental dimensions of humans’ social cognition – perceived warmth (benign or ill intent) and competence (high or low ability), proposed within the Stereotype Content Model ( Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002 ) – animal stereotypes are identified, together with associated prejudices and behavioral tendencies. In line with human intergroup threats, both realistic and symbolic threats associated with animals are reviewed. As a whole, animals appear to be social perception targets within the human sphere of influence and a valid topic for research.

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Fitch, W. Tecumseh. "Animal Cognition and Animal RightsDo Animals Think? By Clive Wynne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004." Current Anthropology 47, no. 3 (June 2006): 559–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/504173.

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Held, S., M. Mendl, C. Devereux, and R. W. Byrne. "Studies in Social Cognition: From Primates to Pigs." Animal Welfare 10, S1 (February 2001): S209—S217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0962728600023630.

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AbstractThe stressful effects that environments have on farm and laboratory animal welfare are likely to depend on how much animals understand of the behaviour and intentions of their conspecifics as well as on their understanding of their physical environment. However, studies on animal social cognition have primarily focused on primates. Here, we report on our work on social cognition in domestic pigs. It focuses on the ability of domestic pigs to assess and use to their advantage the behaviour of conspecifics, and uses approaches pioneered in studies on primates. Our work has shown that dominant pigs use the privileged knowledge of a subordinate to their own advantage in a competitive foraging situation. While such exploitative behaviour is likely to be based on rapid learning about the subordinate ‘s behaviour, it is also possible that ‘higher’ cognitive abilities such as visual perspective taking could be involved. Ongoing work uses an adaptation of the Guesser-Knower paradigm to test whether pigs are indeed capable of visual perspective taking.

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Sih, Andrew, and Marco Del Giudice. "Linking behavioural syndromes and cognition: a behavioural ecology perspective." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1603 (October 5, 2012): 2762–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0216.

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With the exception of a few model species, individual differences in cognition remain relatively unstudied in non-human animals. One intriguing possibility is that variation in cognition is functionally related to variation in personality. Here, we review some examples and present hypotheses on relationships between personality (or behavioural syndromes) and individual differences in cognitive style. Our hypotheses are based largely on a connection between fast–slow behavioural types (BTs; e.g. boldness, aggressiveness, exploration tendency) and cognitive speed–accuracy trade-offs. We also discuss connections between BTs, cognition and ecologically important aspects of decision-making, including sampling, impulsivity, risk sensitivity and choosiness. Finally, we introduce the notion of cognition syndromes, and apply ideas from theories on adaptive behavioural syndromes to generate predictions on cognition syndromes.

Journal articles on the topic 'Cognition in animals'

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