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 model of autism Stephanie White at the University of California Los Angeles, who studied mutations in the FOXP2 gene and its potential role in learned vocalization in both songbirds (specifically the zebra finch) and humans. In 2013, a study was published by Swiss researchers which concluded that 91% (31 out of the 34 studies reviewed) of valproic acid-autism studies using animal models suffered from statistical flaws—specifically, they had failed to correctly use the litter as a level of statistical analysis rather than just the individual (i.e., an individual mouse or rat). Animal model of autism The development of an animal model of autism