Animal Cognition

Undergraduate

will use a comparative approach to teach students about how animals acquire, process, and use information. Early lectures will cover mechanisms such as perception, learning, memory, and recognition. Later lectures will consider how cognition enables animals to interact with their physical and social environments by facilitating navigation, counting, planning, tool use, communication, cooperation, social learning, teaching, and other abilities. A focus will be on why these abilities evolve in some animal groups but not others.