A Genetic Approach to the Study of Simple Cognitive Abilities in Animals

Inga I. Poletaeva,

Zoya A. Zorina

Published: Sept. 26, 2014

One of the urgent problems in cognitive studies and in neurobiology as a whole is to delineate the impact of genetic factors in the variability of animal cognitive abilities. The concept of animal cognition is frequently used in a broad sense to include all phenomena with behavioral manifestations of neural plasticity. The variable phenomena related to animal cognition could be subdivided into two main categories, although only the first of them will be analyzed in this paper. The first category is represented by “basal” cognitive abilities, which embrace spatial cognitive behavior and elementary reasoning (simple logic task solutions). The second …