Animal Cognition

Lizards may not yet be widely known for their smarts, but they’ve become star study subjects for more and more cognition researchers. This is especially true at The Lizard Lab. […]

Do you know the feeling when you’ve been struggling with something for ages and suddenly the solution dawns on you? Eureka! What you’ve just done constitutes insight, the ability to use a mental representation of a problem and draw on past experience and knowledge to solve it. Are humans the only species that can do this? […]

Tortoises may be slow in a race, but not when it comes to thinking. “Generally people see reptiles as inert, stupid and unresponsive, I would like people to see that there is something much more complex going on.”1 says Dr. Anna Wilkinson, the University of Lincoln’s senior lecturer of animal cognition, and lead researcher of several [..]

For many people, horses are rarely the first animal they think of when it comes to intelligence. Their capacity to learn is something that has been particularly passed over, likely because much of the behavior they learn from humans has long been expected. For example, we tend to see a horse that is able to […]

Reptiles aren’t typically considered the most social of animals, but research has proven that they are actually capable of social learning. A study1 published in September 2014 reports that they can learn new skills through imitation. This is the first evidence for this type of learning in reptiles. Previously, it was thought to only […]