Research Digest: Surprising cognitive abilities of non-humans

Some cognitive abilities of non-human animals can appear to be amazing. Sure we can talk about those too, but some findings are more surprising than that. Did you know that plants have shown evidence of being sensitive to the consistency of nutrient availability? — this effectively is risky decision-making!

  1. Pea Plants Show Risk Sensitivity
    [http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)30459-6]
  2. Identifying hallmarks of consciousness in non-mammalian species [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810004000935]
  3. Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6803/abs/407470a0.html]
  4. The frontiers of insect cognition [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154616302017]
  5. Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1901/jeab.1995.63-165/full]
  6. Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/202]
  7. The phylogenetic distribution of ultraviolet sensitivity in birds [https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-13-36]

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Christopher R. Madan, PhD

Written by

Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, Psychology. Computational cognitive neuroscience. Memory; motivated cognition; brain morphology.

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