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 difficult to study because of the large number of animals involved. The experimental approach is therefore often complemented by mathematical modeling of animal aggregations. Experiments investigating the structure of animal aggregations seek to determine the 3D position of each animal within a volume at each point in time. It is important to know the internal structure of the group because that structure can be related to the proposed motivations for animal grouping. This capability requires the use of multiple cameras trained on the same volume in space, a technique known as stereophotogrammetry. When hundreds or thousands of animals occupy the