Samadi Galpayage

University of Trento | UNITN · CIMEC - Center for Mind/Brain Sciences

In uncertain environments, animals often face the challenge of deciding whether to stay with their current foraging option or leave to pursue the next opportunity. The voluntary decision to persist at a location or with one option is a critical cognitive ability in animal temporal decision-making. Little is known about whether foraging insects form...

A variety of animals have been found to interact with and manipulate inanimate objects ‘just for fun’, that is, to play. Most clear examples of object play come from mammals and birds. However, whether insects interact with inanimate objects as a form of play has never been systematically examined. Here, we show that rolling of wooden balls by bumb...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) established a research program that was in sharp contrast to prevailing ideas regarding animal behavior and cognition. Despite facing almost insurmountable barriers because of his African American ethnicity, he published more than 70 papers, including several in Science (1–...

Most research in comparative cognition focuses on measuring if animals manage certain tasks; fewer studies explore how animals might solve them. We investigated bumblebees' scanning strategies in a numerosity task, distinguishing patterns with 2 items from 4 and 1 from 3, and subsequently transferring numerical information to novel numbers, shapes...

When counting-like abilities were first described in the honeybee in the mid-1990s, many scholars were sceptical, but such capacities have since been confirmed in a number of paradigms and also in other insect species. Counter to the intuitive notion that counting is a cognitively advanced ability, neural network analyses indicate that it can be me...