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),
Animal cognition presses a lever. The animal is then tested by being given an intermediate stimulus C, e.g. a 500 Hz tone, and observing whether the animal presses the lever associated with the positive or negative reward. This has been suggested to indicate whether the animal is in a positive or negative mood. In a study that used this approach, rats that were playfully tickled responded differently than rats that were simply handled. The rats that had been tickled were more optimistic than the handled rats. The authors suggested that they had demonstrated "...for the first time a link between the directly