Despite prolonged interest in comparing brain size and behavioral proxies of" intelligence"
across taxa, the adaptive and cognitive significance of brain size variation remains elusive …

Humans use a variety of cues to infer an object's weight, including how easily objects can be
moved. For example, if we observe an object being blown down the street by the wind, we …

Highlights•Flexible tool use is rare in the wild but more common in captivity.•These
behaviours emerge from the interplay between learning and inborn predispositions.•We …

To gain a better understanding of the evolution of animal cognition, it is necessary to test
and compare the cognitive abilities of a broad array of taxa. Meaningful inter-species …

Complex adaptive agents consistently achieve their goals by solving problems that seem to
require an understanding of causal information, information pertaining to the causal …

The ability to make profitable decisions in natural foraging contexts may be influenced by an
additional requirement of tool-use, due to increased levels of relational complexity and …

In this study, the improved Aesop's fable paradigm—a series of experiments originally used
to test whether some animals understand the causality associated with water replacement …

Rooks, Eurasian jays and NC crows have already solved the Aesop's fable paradigm, using
stones to raise a water level to get a previously out of reach reward. Here we test kea parrots …

After these rather theoretical considerations on the cognitive components of tool use, let us
now turn to some experiments that have been used to test them. The most studied abilities …

In this book, the major and at the same time most difficult questions of comparative cognition
research-here called the sextet of animal intelligence-are presented using good examples …