Have you ever had the experience of hearing a new song repeatedly on the radio and when you first heard it, you strongly disliked it, but after your favorite radio station played it over and over and over again, it eventually grew on you? Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic” is a recent example for me. As […]
Animal Learning & Cognition
Imagine. . . . . .yourself in a grocery store, trying to reach the milk on the rack in front of you, or the last milk at the very top that is stuck in the back . . . Your brain begins to calculate the options . . . How far do you need to […]
Have you checked if your front door is locked? Is your stove turned off? Are you “saving” all those mailers, coupons, and magazines? How about folding those plastic sacks from the grocery store and tucking them away for another day? Have you scrubbed your counter-tops recently? All of these behaviors are considered “normal” for most […]
As a lecturer, I know my students but I do find it hard to keep track of which students are doing which modules and who graduated one vs two years ago. Complex group living requires animals to know and keep track of various relations between themselves and others. These could be seen in the form […]
A variety of things can influence memory, and we frequently find that existing knowledge can impact the learning of new information. For example, some people (including me) find it hard to learn to drive an automatic car because of their pre-existing knowledge of driving a stick shift (standard) car. For example, early during the transition, […]
We often think about conceptual thought as being uniquely human, however, there is growing evidence to suggest that animals can learn concepts as well. The use of concepts requires understanding the relationship between stimuli. So, if I presented these three faces to you and asked you who was familiar, my guess if that you’d choose […]
As humans we use numbers in almost everything that we do. They are used to quantify, categorise and measure all aspects of everyday life. The same is true of animals: numbers could be useful to them to identify how many animals there are in a competing group, the amount of food available and so on. […]
All aspects of animal behaviour are the result of a choice. By choosing to do one thing an animal is therefore not doing something else. These decisions need to be made in a manner that maximizes the likelihood of survival. Because of this emphasis on survival, decisions are generally studied from an ecological perspective; however, […]
Cultural traditions are common in humans and are thought to be rooted in our evolutionary history; they are deeply ingrained in our society and can, under certain conditions, result in non-adaptive behavior. Given this, might one also expect to observe evidence of cultural traditions in non-human animals? But how do we look for “culture” in animals? […]
Quantity (like size) matters when we are making decisions about all aspects of our life. If something costs the same but we have the choice to have more or less of it, have you ever deliberately chosen less? Even when on a diet? There’s a very good reason for this. It is adaptive to go […]