Animal cognition Animal cognition Animal cognition describes the mental capacities of non-human animals and the study of those capacities. The field developed from comparative psychology, including the study of animal conditioning and learning. It has also been strongly influenced by research in ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology, and hence the alternative name cognitive ethology is sometimes used. Many behaviors associated with the term "animal intelligence" are also subsumed within animal cognition. Researchers have examined animal cognition in mammals (especially primates, cetaceans, elephants, dogs, cats, pigs, horses, cattle, raccoons and rodents), birds (including parrots, fowl, corvids and pigeons), reptiles (lizards and snakes),
Methods used to study memory supportive tissue unaffected. Research animals are a good substitute for humans because similar principles are assumed to underlie basic mechanisms of brain function. In order to fully understand human memory, cross-species comparisons in neuropsychology are used so that multiple variables can be manipulated. The more experimental control we have, the easier it is to eliminate confounding variables, and better causal conclusions can be made. Although there is no single "ideal" animal model of a human, for each problem of interest there is an animal upon which it can be most conveniently studied. For example, the study of spatial memory has