Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals including insect cognition. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. It has also been strongly influenced by research in ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology; the alternative name cognitive ethology is sometimes used. Many behaviors associated with the term animal intelligence are also subsumed within animal cognition.
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology known as purposive behaviorism. Tolman also promoted the concept known as latent learning first coined by Blodgett (1929). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event. Spatial memory is necessary for orientation in space. Spatial memory can also be divided into egocentric and allocentric spatial memory. A person's spatial memory is required to navigate around a familiar city. A rat's spatial memory is needed to learn the location of food at the end of a maze. In both humans and animals, spatial memories are summarized as a cognitive map.
The Morris water navigation task, also known as the Morris water maze, is a behavioral procedure mostly used with rodents. It is widely used in behavioral neuroscience to study spatial learning and memory. It enables learning, memory, and spatial working to be studied with great accuracy, and can also be used to assess damage to particular cortical regions of the brain. It is used by neuroscientists to measure the effect of neurocognitive disorders on spatial learning and possible neural treatments, to test the effect of lesions to the brain in areas concerned with memory, and to study how age influences cognitive function and spatial learning. The task is also used as a tool to study drug-abuse, neural systems, neurotransmitters, and brain development.
The radial arm maze was designed by Olton and Samuelson in 1976 to measure spatial learning and memory in rats. The original apparatus consists of eight equidistantly spaced arms, each about 4 feet long, and all radiating from a small circular central platform. At the end of each arm there is a food site, the contents of which are not visible from the central platform.
A place cell is a kind of pyramidal neuron in the hippocampus that becomes active when an animal enters a particular place in its environment, which is known as the place field. Place cells are thought to act collectively as a cognitive representation of a specific location in space, known as a cognitive map. Place cells work with other types of neurons in the hippocampus and surrounding regions to perform this kind of spatial processing. They have been found in a variety of animals, including rodents, bats, monkeys and humans.
Idiothetic literally means "self-proposition", and is used in navigation models to describe the use of self-motion cues, rather than allothetic, or external, cues such as landmarks, to determine position and movement. The word is sometimes also spelled "ideothetic". Idiothetic cues include vestibular, optic flow and proprioception. Idiothetic cues are important for the type of navigation known as path integration in which subjects navigate purely using such self-motion cues. This is achieved by an animal through the signals generated by angular and linear accelerations in the course of its exploration. These information generate and update a vector towards the starting point and an accurate path for return.
A cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. He tried to explain the behavior of rats that appeared to learn the spatial layout of a maze, and subsequently the concept was applied to other animals, including humans. The term was later generalized by some researchers, especially in the field of operations research, to refer to a kind of semantic network representing an individual's personal knowledge or schemas.
A water maze is a device used to test an animal's memory in which the alleys are filled with water, providing a motivation to escape.
The Barnes maze is a tool used in psychological laboratory experiments to measure spatial learning and memory. The test was first developed by Dr. Carol Barnes in 1979. The test subjects are usually rodents such as mice or lab rats, which either serve as a control or may have some genetic variable or deficiency present in them which will cause them to react to the maze differently. The basic function of Barnes maze is to measure the ability of a mouse to learn and remember the location of a target zone using a configuration of distal visual cues located around the testing area. This noninvasive task is useful for evaluating novel chemical entities for their effects on cognition as well as identifying cognitive deficits in transgenic strains of rodents that model for disease such as Alzheimer's disease. It is also used by neuroscientists to determine whether there is a causative effect after mild traumatic brain injury on learning deficits and spatial memory retention (probe) at acute and chronic time points. This task is dependent on the intrinsic inclination of the subjects to escape from an aversive environment and on hippocampal-dependent spatial reference memory.
The oasis maze is a spatial memory task used in psychology and neuroscience research and is the dry version of the Morris water navigation task. It is a land-based spatial memory task in which a thirsty rat uses distal spatial cues to search an open field for a specific location (Oasis) containing water. The maze consists of an enclosed space in which a small amount of water is hidden. A thirsty rat is then placed in the maze and learns where the water is by trial and error. The maze tests memory by allowing the researcher to record the rat's performance on this task after it is learned and various time intervals or other events supposedly disruptive to memory have occurred.
Selective amnesia is a type of amnesia in which the sufferer loses only certain parts of their memory. Common elements that may be forgotten are relationships, where they live, and certain special abilities and talents.
Allothetic means being centred in people or places other than oneself. It has been defined as a process of "determining and maintaining a course or trajectory from one place to another. It can be used as a navigational strategy among animals to aid in their survival. It can also be a source of information for machines, particularly those biologically-inspired models and is provided by a set of laser rangefinders, sonars, or vision.
The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is a cortical area in the brain comprising Brodmann areas 29 and 30. It is secondary association cortex, making connections with numerous other brain regions. The region's name refers to its anatomical location immediately behind the splenium of the corpus callosum in primates, although in rodents it is located more towards the brain surface and is relatively larger. Its function is currently not well understood, but its location close to visual areas and also to the hippocampal spatial/memory system suggest it may have a role in mediating between perceptual and memory functions, particularly in the spatial domain. However, its exact contribution to either space or memory processing has been hard to pin down.
Purposive behaviorism is a branch of psychology that was introduced by Edward Tolman. It combines the study of behavior while also considering the purpose or goal of behavior. Tolman thought that learning developed from knowledge about the environment and how the organism relates to its environment. Tolman's goal was to identify the complex cognitive mechanisms and purposes that guided behavior. His theories on learning went against the traditionally accepted stimulus-response connections at his time that had been proposed by other psychologists such as Edward Thorndike. Tolman disagreed with John B.Watson's behaviorism, so he initiated his own behaviorism, which became known as purposive behaviorism.
The relationship between sleep and memory has been studied since at least the early 19th century. Memory, the cognitive process of storing and retrieving past experiences, learning and recognition, is a product of brain plasticity, the structural changes within synapses that create associations between stimuli. Stimuli are encoded within milliseconds; however, the long-term maintenance of memories can take additional minutes, days, or even years to fully consolidate and become a stable memory that is accessible. Therefore, the formation of a specific memory occurs rapidly, but the evolution of a memory is often an ongoing process.
Spontaneous Alternation Behavior (SAB) describes the tendency to alternate in their pursuit of different stimuli in consecutive trials despite a lack of training or reinforcement. The Behavior emerged from experiments using animals, mainly rodents, who naturally demonstrated the behavioral pattern when placed in previously unexplored maze shapes.
Spatial cognition is the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. It is most about how animals including humans behave within space and the knowledge they built around it, rather than space itself. These capabilities enable individuals to manage basic and high-level cognitive tasks in everyday life. Numerous disciplines work together to understand spatial cognition in different species, especially in humans. Thereby, spatial cognition studies also have helped to link cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Scientists in both fields work together to figure out what role spatial cognition plays in the brain as well as to determine the surrounding neurobiological infrastructure.
Many memory impairments exist as a result from or cause of eating disorders. Eating disorders (EDs) are characterized by abnormal and disturbed eating patterns that affect the lives of the individuals who worry about their weight to the extreme. These abnormal eating patterns involve either inadequate or excessive food intake, affecting the individual's physical and mental health.
In behavioral science, a T-maze is a simple forked passage used in animal cognition experiments. It is shaped like the letter T, providing the subject, typically a rodent, with a straightforward choice. T-mazes are used to study how the rodents function with memory and spatial learning through applying various stimuli. Starting in the early 20th century, rodents were used in experiments such as the T-maze. These concepts of T-mazes are used to assess rodent behavior. The different tasks, such as left-right discrimination and forced alternation, are mainly used with rodents to test reference and working memory.
