A crucial skill for survival among animals is distinguishing between living and non-living entities, be those predators, social companions, or prey. Animacy is the perceived property of an object to be animate. Therefore, animals should possess fast unlearnt mechanisms for the detection of animacy. If, for instance, primates would rely on learning to avoid venomous snakes, they would probably die at the first encounter. If chicks would imprint on the first object seen immediately after hatching, they would frequently end up imprinting on an eggshell. It is thus likely that selective pressures shaped an adaptive set of unlearnt rudimental knowledge, shared among species. This knowledge helps them to tell apart, in an otherwise undifferentiated sensory world, animate from inanimate objects. Further learning would capitalize on this rudimental, original knowledge and shape more sophisticated cognitive abilities and behaviors (Vallortigara, 2009, 2012b, 2012a; Versace, Martinho-Truswell, Kacelnik, & Vallortigara, 2018). Some configurations of features and movements help animals to disentangle between animate and inanimate objects. The present chapter will thus discuss behavioural evidence and suggested neural mechanisms underlying the detection of static and dynamic cues to animacy in the various species with particular emphasis on their ontogenetic development.

This chapter reviews five decades of research on reactions to mirrors and self-recognition in nonhuman primates, starting with Gallup’s (1970) pioneering experimental demonstration of self-recognition in chimpanzees and its apparent absence in monkeys. Taking a decade-by-decade approach, developments in the field are presented separately for great apes on the one hand, and all other primates on the other (prosimians, monkeys, and so-called lesser apes), considering both empirical studies and theoretical issues. The literature clearly shows that among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes, despite an impressive range of sometimes highly original procedures employed to study many monkey species. In the past decade, research has been shifting from simple questions about whether great apes can self-recognize (now considered beyond doubt), to addressing possible biological bases for individual and species differences in the strength of self-recognition, analysis of possible adaptive functions of the capacity for self-visualization, and searching for evidence of self-recognition in a range of nonprimate species.

The study of numerical capacities in animals has a long and colorful history, and has enjoyed a resurgence of intriguing experiments in recent years, exploring a variety of species outside the use of more typical laboratory species, including nonhuman primates, in the past two decades.A wealth of new studies has been forthcoming, including a significant number of well-controlled experiments with fish, and have examined the contribution of group size, movement, species, and sex of fish, surface area of aggregated conspecifics, number vs. continuous quantity, and the development of quantity-discrimination skills.Most such skills appear to be within the capacity of certain fish species, and these studies have also been expanded to include other amphibians, such as salamanders, frogs, and toads.Additional studies have been extended to canid populations not previously examined for numerical skills, including feral dogs, coyotes, and wolves.While much of the last thirty years of experiments with more complex numerical skills in animals were conducted with chimpanzees, more recent studies with monkeys and continued comparisons with chimpanzees have established a host of demonstrated skills in the archival literature.The area of quantity discriminations, numerosity, and numerical skills remains an exciting and vibrant area for future experimental work in comparative cognition.

Collective intelligence – superior performance by groups compared to that of the individuals that compose them – is often achieved via social information use. However, collective intelligence has rarely been studied in terms of social learning. This is partially because social learning strategies (i.e. "when" and "who" to copy) are often hard to observe in a natural group setting. Our main goal in this article is to show that tandem-running recruitment by Temnothorax ants offers a promising model to study the interaction of social learning and collective intelligence. We first review the role of tandem runs in the ecology and collective behavior of these ants, who use them to share information about the locations of valuable resources. A key advantage of Temnothorax ants as a model system is that each instance of information sharing – each tandem run – can be easily observed. Moreover, the specific information transferred can be readily inferred by tracking the history and subsequent behavior of leader and follower. We then propose new investigations into how social learning via tandem runs affects their collective performance. Finally, we discuss how the synthesis of the two fields of social learning and collective intelligence can shed light on the role of feedback from learning in improving collective performance over time.

Social learning, a type of information transmission in which individuals gain information by observing or interacting with another animal or the products of another animal’s actions, is an extensively studied subject in a wide array of species. Of particular interest is the ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to learn socially, especially given their extensive sociality and fission–fusion dynamics, which provides many opportunities for individuals to learn from each other in different contexts. Using observational and experimental approaches, researchers have explored how faithfully chimpanzees copy others, the type of information conveyed between individuals, and the extent to which social learning is influenced by external factors. In this chapter we review what is currently known about the mechanisms by which chimpanzees socially learn and the strategies they may employ when doing so. We also discuss the much-debated topic of chimpanzee "culture," and how this compares to our own culture. Last, we provide a comparative perspective for social learning in chimpanzees with other species, and discuss how understanding chimpanzee social learning can be useful in their captive care and aiding their conservation in the wild.

Capuchins are highly encephalized New World monkeys (family Cebidae, subfamily Cebinae) living in a variety of forest and savannah habitats, from Central to South America, and currently classified as “gracile” (the Cebus genus) or “robust” (the Sapajus genus). The literature on behavioural plasticity in this taxon highlights purported traditions in the social domain (as the dyadic “games” of Cebus capucinus) and in foraging techniques (notably, the use of tools by Sapajus spp.). Behavioural innovations (sensu “process”) are more easily detected in the social realm, while technological traditions seem to result from [inferred] innovations (sensu “product”) facilitated by innate predispositions and environmental affordances and perpetuated by means of socially biased learning. Constraints related to simpler forms of social learning (like “stimulus enhancement”) may limit the potential for cumulative cultural processes, resulting in conservative traditions, as may be the case of percussive stone tools’ use. On the other hand, the degrees of “niche construction” and “observability” associated to different forms of tool use may explain the difference between the widespread stone tool use traditions and the rarer cases of customary probe use (where individual innovations may occur, but seldom spread by socially mediated learning), in terms of different opportunities for socially mediated learning.

The study of convergent cognitive evolution aims to understand how similarities in physical and social intelligence emerge in evolutionarily distant species. This field, which is relatively new, has focused on a number of taxa, including nonhuman primates, corvids, and other birds, cetaceans, canids, and elephants. In this chapter, we highlight the social minds of elephants in particular, with a review of existing observational and experimental research. Investigations of the proximate mechanisms that underlie social behavior require an understanding of how an animal "sees," "hears," "touches,"and "smells" its world. Thus, we emphasize the need to take elephants’ sensory perspective into account when investigating their cognition, especially considering their exceptional olfactory and acoustic senses. We briefly review the literature on elephant social cognition, and discuss the relevance of such research to elephant conservation.

The social life of animals poses specific adaptive challenges that may be cognitively different to challenges from ecological adaptations to their physical environment.Social cognitive adaptations for dealing with other agents are evolutionarily remarkable in that they automatically become an adaptive challenge that may trigger counter- or co-adaptations. This chapter discusses three main problems in social cognition: first, the issue of mentalism or theory of mind, or whether social cognitive adaptations in animals are based on mentalistic attribution skills that may involve representing the intentions and knowledge of others; second, the cognitive underpinnings of animal communication, with a focus on referential and intentional communication; and third, the problem of how animals know and represent the social relations structuring their groups. There is widespread debate about how the social knowledge and reasoning demonstrated in animal social behavior are exactly implemented. The traditional debate in comparative psychology between reductionist behavioristic explanations and complex cognitive explanations has become especially pronounced in social cognition. A widespread proposal is that the type of knowledge demonstrated by animals is ‘implicit,’ distinct both from the verbally expressible knowledge evolved by humans, and from low-level, reflex-like associative behaviours and habits. However, the key notion of implicit knowledge remains elusive and ill-defined.

Bottlenose dolphins are a large-brained, long-lived, highly social species, operating within a fission-fusion society characterized by broad multi-level social networks, extensive care giving and teaching of offspring, cooperative and diverse hunting tactics, long-term alliances, and learned vocal signals that broadcast an individual’s identity, can be used in referential exchanges and can be imitated by close associates.Observations of behavior and social interactions in the wild suggest that social cognition in the bottlenose dolphins is well developed.Over the past thrity years, experimental studies have revealed that bottlenose dolphins have decades long social memories of associates, can develop a broad concept of imitation that extends to arbitrary novel sounds and social behaviors presented in a variety of contexts as well as to self-initiated behaviors.Dolphins have also been shown to be able to learn about and appreciate the social requisites of cooperative behavior, can spontaneously understand the referential character of human-initiated social signals involving pointing and gazing, and can employ pointing productively in communicative exchanges with humans to achieve goals.Collectively, dolphin social-cognition abilities are sophisticated and similar in several aspects to those of other species living within complex social networks, such as elephants, chimpanzees, and humans.

Birds have contributed a great deal to our understanding of social learning. In this chapter we briefly review this extensive body of research, describing the contexts in which birds use social information to make behavioral decisions. We discuss the ecological factors that promote social learning, and the mechanisms by which social learning occurs. We consider individual differences in social learning, focusing on how learning strategies and biases influence when, how and from whom birds will learn. We examine the consequences of social learning for evolutionary processes, from the emergence of culture to speciation and adaptation to environmental change. Finally, we highlight how knowledge of social learning processes can be applied in the conservation and management of threatened bird species.

This chapter reviews research on visual categorization in pigeons including (1) basic-level categories, members of which are perceptually similar to each other (e.g., car or chair), (2) subordinate-level categories representing a subclass of a basic level category (e.g.,office chair or sports car), and (3) superordinate-level categories comprising several basic-level categories (e.g., furniture or vehicle).Current research convincingly demonstrates pigeons’ ability to form these categories. Moreover, pigeons’ basic-level categories appear to be similar to those of humans. However, the extent of similarity between superordinate-level and subordinate-level categories in pigeons and humans is not yet clear.

Hummingbirds are faced with a challenging memory task every day. In order to keep a positive energy balance, these birds need to remember which flowers they have visited and which ones they have not. The properties of flowers provide hummingbirds with different types of information about colour, shape, space, and time to guide how they forage. Here we discuss how researchers have adapted established laboratory paradigms for use in the field to understand how hummingbirds use this information. We discuss why hummingbirds have turned out to be a suitable model to study cognition in the wild, the main findings that have established how to study memory in wild animals of a project expanding to three decades.