Learning, Memory, and Cognition: Animal Perspectives

Abstract

Cognition is the integrating process that utilizes many different forms of memory, creates internal representations of the experienced world and provides a reference for expecting the future of the animal’s own actions. It thus allows the animal to decide between different options in reference to the expected outcome of its potential actions. All these processes occur as intrinsic operations of the nervous system, and provide an implicit form of knowledge for controlling behavior. None of these processes need to – and certainly will not – become explicit within the nervous systems of many animal species (in particular invertebrates and lower vertebrates), but such processes must be assumed to also exist in these animal species. It is the goal of comparative animal cognition to relate the complexity of the nervous system to the level of internal processing.