animal cognition news, articles and features | New Scientist

What the evolution of tickling tells us about being human

Sam Wong — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:00:19 +0000

From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we’re ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains

Why you should assume that even the simplest animals are conscious

Michael Marshall — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:00:15 +0000

There is mounting evidence that even surprisingly simple animals, like invertebrates, have a level of consciousness - but not in the way you might think

What the extraordinary medical know-how of wild animals can teach us

Graham Lawton — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

Pigeons are misunderstood: These little-known facts will prove why

Joshua Howgego — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:00:28 +0000

They were loved by Charles Darwin, they build brilliantly bad nests and they even produce a kind of “milk”. Surely, these facts are more than enough to foster a love for the urban pigeon

The amazing talents of pigeons – and why we should learn to love them

Joshua Howgego — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Rats of the sky? Pigeons are often the target of human ire, but there's a lot to cherish – or at least appreciate – in these scrappy survivors

She’s obsessed with chicken! The tests revealing my dog’s inner life

Thomas Lewton — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Dog owners often wonder what's really going on between their pets' fluffy ears. Now, savvy experiments and new technology are finally giving us a clearer glimpse

Inside ‘Puppy Kindergarten’: Science-based ways to train your dog

Obomate Briggs — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 12:37:30 +0000

A unique project is revealing science-based ways you can train your dog to behave better. Researchers Vanessa Wood and Brian Hare have set up a “puppy kindergarten” programme at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to investigate the behaviours required of service dogs and shed new light on milestones in dogs’ cognitive development. “Dogs, like humans, can continue learning their whole lives. Any given behaviour is trainable,” says evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, whose research, alongside Hare, explores the So far, the work has revealed insights into the variability of individual pups’ behaviour, suggesting the relative importance of genetics is different for different behavioural traits. A look inside the Duke Puppy Kindergarten programme provides dog owners with some methods to test and develop their dogs’ cognitive abilities at home.

How a unique puppy kindergarten lab put the science into dog training

Colin Barras — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:01:00 +0000

Most dogs aren't bred to feel at ease in our homes, but scientists studying puppy cognition have found ways you can help yours adapt

Fish size themselves up in a mirror to decide if they can win a fight

Corryn Wetzel — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:00:10 +0000

A bluestreak cleaner wrasse checking itself out in the mirror

Osaka Metropolitan University

Before deciding whether or not to fight another fish, cleaner wrasse check their own reflection in a mirror and size themselves up.

Bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) are remarkably bright. These finger-sized coral reef fish were the first fish to pass the mirror test, a common assessment to see whether an animal recognises that the reflection is of its own body and not another animal. Researchers have now found that these wrasses use their likeness to construct a mental image of their body size, which they can compare to others.

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First, at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan and his colleagues tested the fish’s willingness to go on the attack. Against the glass wall of the fish tank, they held up an image of another wrasse that was either 10 per cent larger or smaller than the real fish. Regardless of the size of the model fish in the photograph, the territorial wrasses picked a fight.

Then, they repeated the test but added a mirror, and the fish checked out their reflection. But when the researchers held up a photo of a larger or smaller cleaner wrasse to the glass pane, the fish chose to fight only smaller rivals.

“This was unexpected because we had an image that this fish always shows aggression against rivals, regardless of size,” says Kobayashi.

The tank was partitioned so that the wrasse couldn’t see its reflection and the rival fish’s photo at the same time – so scientists think the fish must be comparing the image to a mental approximation of their own body size.

Cleaner wrasse evolved in an environment without mirrors, so how did they end up with this skill? Whether in the lab or in the wild, it benefits a fish to know what size they are before picking a fight, says Kobayashi. In other words, the fish were clever enough to employ the mirror as a decision-making tool.

Journal reference:

Scientific Reports

Ants learn faster on caffeine

Corryn Wetzel — Thu, 23 May 2024 15:00:34 +0000

Ants that drink a caffeinated solution can locate sweet rewards faster than un-caffeinated ants, suggesting the drug boosts learning. To see how Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) respond to caffeine, researchers created an ant-sized arena on a sheet of printer paper in the lab. They then placed a drop of sugary solution on the paper for an ant to find. Some solutions had no caffeine, while others had low, moderate or high amounts, but all were placed in the same location. “We took a bunch of measures of their paths and how fast they were at finding the food source to assess if caffeine is actually improving their learning,” says at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Of the 142 ants in the study, each was given four tries.

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The ants who received low or moderate doses of caffeine took a more direct path to the sweet treat with each trial, suggesting they had successfully remembered the location of the reward. Ants without caffeine took more meandering paths that did not improve over time. Galante emphasises that this isn’t about making the ants move faster, but more efficiently: caffeine had no impact on the ants’ pace but did reduce the twists and turns they took to get there.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) seem to benefit from caffeine

Laure-Anne Poissonnier (CC-BY-SA)

The researchers found that more caffeine isn’t always better, though. Ants who drank the lowest dose – 25 parts per million (ppm), which the researchers say is similar to caffeine levels found naturally in some plants – improved their search time by 28 per cent. Ants that got the moderate 250 ppm dose – close to an energy drink – were even more adept, dropping search time by 38 per cent. But the highest dose, 2000 ppm, proved fatal. Because Argentine ants are a widespread and costly invasive species, Galante says the work could inform efforts to control them. His team is currently testing caffeine-laced baits in the field in Spain with the hope that the drug will boost ants’ ability to learn the bait location – and in turn, help control ant numbers while using less poison.