They have demonstrated cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use.
Generally speaking, plant behaviour is still assumed to be rather rigid, stereotyped and inflexible, and even when plants demonstrate cognitive competences such as the ability to learn, for example, their learning capacity is widely considered to be fully pre-programmed.
As well as demonstrating cognitive empathy, the ability to understand how another person feels, there was also some evidence of affective empathy, experiencing he emotions that other people are feeling (" I found his story distressing", " My final piece demonstrates the acceptance, respect, love and hope that has developed for Rebecca and which…she began to feel for herself").
A number of studies suggest that corvids demonstrate social cognitive abilities similar to those of apes (Bugynar et al. 2007; Dally et al. 2006; Emery & Clayton 2004).
Hare (2001) argued that primates may best demonstrate sophisticated cognitive abilities in test settings that are most relevant to them.
Although both species have demonstrated advanced cognitive abilities in a variety of tasks (e.g. [57] [60]), they performed differently in our study, as we found solid evidence for exclusion [3] in ravens only.
Early psittacine studies were aimed at demonstrating a particular cognitive ability existed in a given species.
They also demonstrate the influence of cognitive ability and learning environment on a common neural system for reading.
A recent, large genome-wide association study (GWAS) reported a genome-wide significant locus for years of education, which subsequently demonstrated association to general cognitive ability ("g") in overlapping cohorts.
The study is one of the first to show how animals make trade-offs in behavior, and is exciting in that it demonstrates "birds have the cognitive ability to react [differently] to certain kinds of predators," says Jeffrey Brawn, a population ecologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign.
