In general, animals are known to be sensitive to the immediacy of reinforcers. That is, they are generally impulsive and outcomes that occur in the future are generally heavily discounted. Furthermore, they should prefer alternatives that provide …

Anglada-Tort et al. Current Biology, 33, 1472–1486.e12, (2023) conducted a large-scale iterative learning study with cross-cultural human participants to understand how musical structure emerges. Together with archaeological, developmental …

Previous experiments found that acceptance of saccharin by rats was reduced if they had prior experience of sucrose or some other highly palatable solution. This study tested whether such successive negative contrast (SNC) effects involve …

Fear and anxiety are rarely confined to specific stimuli or situations. In fear generalisation, there is a spread of fear responses elicited by physically dissimilar generalisation stimuli (GS) along a continuum between danger and safety. The …

Category learning is often tested with similar images that have no significance outside of the experiment for the subjects. By contrast, in nature animals often need to generalize a behavioral response like “eat” across visually distinct stimuli …

Behavioral interventions to improve self-control, preference for a larger-later (LL) reward over a smaller-sooner (SS) reward, involve experience with delayed rewards. Whether they involve timing processes remains controversial. In rats, there …

Heinsohn et al. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290, 2023.1271, (2023) report that the choice of tool type (drumsticks or seed pods) and the shape of drumsticks manufactured by palm cockatoos differ among individuals. This variation does not …

A recent paper by Pepperberg, Learning & Behavior, 51, 5–6, (2023) enquires about the validity of the finding that dogs are susceptible to the Kanizsa’s triangle illusion, reported by Lõoke and coauthors (Lõoke et al., Animal Cognition, 25, 43–51 …

Bielecki et al. Current Biology, 33, 4150–4159, (2023) described new behavioral and physiological paradigms to study associative learning and its neural basis in the Cnidaria Tripedalia cystophora. We discuss the relevance of these findings to …

A recent paper Smulders et al., (2023) analyzed results of an experiment in which food-caching coal tits needed to relocate and recover multiple previously made food caches and argued that food caching parids use familiarity and not recollection …

Extinguished responses have been shown to reappear under several circumstances, and this reappearance is considered to model behaviors such as relapse after exposure therapy. Conducting extinction in multiple contexts has been explored as a …

The midsession reversal task involves a simultaneous discrimination between stimuli S1 and S2. Choice of S1 but not S2 is reinforced during the first 40 trials, and choice of S2 but not S1 is reinforced during the last 40 trials. Trials are …

In a noteworthy observation, Godfrey-Smith and colleagues report the first evidence of debris throwing in wild octopuses, including instances where they target conspecifics. Proposing parallels with behaviours observed in select social mammals …

A recent study by Johnston, Brecht, and Nieder (2023, Current Biology, 33, 3238–3243) finds that carrion crows associate varying rates of reinforcement with novel arbitrary stimuli and make optimal decisions when they must later choose between …

When seeing a visual image, humans prioritize the perception of global features, which is followed by the assessment of the local ones. This global precedence has been investigated using hierarchical stimuli that consist of a large, global shape …

Memory for what, where, and when an event took place has been interpreted as playing a critical role in episodic memory. Moreover, such memory is likely to be important to an animal’s ability to efficiently forage for food. In Experiment 1 of the …

Sex differences have been found in allocentric spatial learning and memory tasks, with the literature indicating that males outperform females, although this issue is still controversial. This study aimed to explore the behavior of male and female …

A research article recently published in PNAS by Agarwal and colleagues (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(5), Article e2212418120, 2023) identified place cells in the brain of flying birds, specifically in the anterior …

Mother dolphins shift their signature whistles to higher frequencies and have larger bandwidths when calling to their dependent calves during separations involving stranded health assessments compared with separations when the calf is absent.

Previous studies have shown that whip spiders (Amblypygi) can use a variety of cues to navigate to and recognize a home refuge. The current study aimed to determine whether whip spiders were capable of using the boundary geometry of an …