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),
Collective animal behavior than a scattered distribution. In the attack component, it was thought that an attacking predator is less likely to eat a particular animal when a greater number of individuals are present. In sum, an individual has an advantage if it is in the larger of two groups, assuming that the probability of detection and attack does not increase disproportionately with the size of the group. A third proposed benefit of animal groups is that of enhanced foraging. This ability was demonstrated by Pitcher and others in their study of foraging behavior in shoaling cyprinids. In this study, the time it