Sarah Benson-Amram

University of Wyoming | UW · Department of Zoology and Physiology

The field of animal cognition has advanced rapidly in the last 25 years. Through careful and creative studies of animals in captivity and in the wild, we have gained critical insights into the evolution of intelligence, the cognitive capacities of a diverse array of taxa, and the importance of ecological and social environments, as well as individu...

Cognitive abilities, such as learning and flexibility, are hypothesized to aid behavioral adaptation to urbanization. Although growing evidence suggests that cognition may indeed facilitate persistence in urban environments, we currently lack knowledge of the cognitive abilities of many urban taxa. Recent methodological advances, including radio fr...

Research on animal cognition has historically focused on the cognitive capabilities of a limited number of species through controlled laboratory studies. Animal cognition research is now broadening to study diverse taxa in their natural environments, which is facilitating insights into the fitness consequences of cognitive traits and a greater unde...

Consistent individual differences in behaviour across time or contexts (i.e. personality types) have been found in many species and have implications for fitness. Likewise, individual variation in cognitive abilities has been shown to impact fitness. Cognition and personality are complex, multidimensional traits. However, previous work has generall...

The cover image is based on the Research Article Cytoarchitectural characteristics associated with cognitive flexibility in raccoons by Joanna Jacob et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.25197.

Animal personality has been shown to predict many behavioral responses across taxa, but the relationship between personality and performance on cognitive tasks remains unclear. To address this gap, we investigated whether personality predicted problem-solving performance and learning in captive Asian and African savanna elephants. We leveraged 3 no...

With rates of psychiatric illnesses such as depression continuing to rise, additional preclinical models are needed to facilitate translational neuroscience research. In the current study, the raccoon (Procyon lotor) was investigated due to its similarities with primate brains, including comparable proportional neuronal densities, cortical magnific...

Urbanization imposes novel challenges for wildlife, but also provides new opportunities for exploitation. Generalist species are commonly found in urban habitats, but the cognitive mechanisms facilitating their successful behavioral adaptations and exploitations are largely under-investigated. Cognitive flexibility is thought to enable generalists...

One of the greatest challenges in comparative cognition is to design tasks that accurately assess cognitive abilities across a diverse set of taxa with differing morphologies and behaviors. The floating object task was designed to test insightful problem solving via water tool use in animals but so far has been tested only in primates. In the float...

Innovation is a well-studied cognitive phenomenon related to general intelligence and brain size. Innovative ability varies considerably within species and it is widely assumed that this variation must have important fitness consequences. However, direct evidence for a link between innovative ability and fitness has rarely been shown. Previous rese...

Innovative problem solving, repeated innovation, learning, and inhibitory control are cognitive abilities commonly regarded as important components of behaviorally flexible species. Animals exhibiting these cognitive abilities may be more likely to adapt to the unique demands of living in novel and rapidly changing environments, such as urbanized l...

We discuss the importance of considering animal cognition in conflict mitigation. Recent work in animal cognition has focused on how animals respond to new or changing environments. Although many species are currently in decline, other species are thriving in human-altered habitats by taking advantage of new resources and opportunities associated w...

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 comparisons are best achieved by employing universal paradigms that standardize testing among species. Many cognitive paradigms, however, have been tested in only a few t...

Although intelligence should theoretically evolve to help animals solve specific types of problems posed by the environment, it is unclear which environmental challenges favour enhanced cognition, or how general intelligence evolves along with domain-specific cognitive abilities. The social intelligence hypothesis posits that big brains and great i...

Playback experiments have proved to be a useful tool to investigate the extent to which wild animals understand numerical concepts and the factors that play into their decisions to respond to different numbers of vocalizing conspecifics. In particular, playback experiments have broadened our understanding of the cognitive abilities of historically...

Many factors, including the demonstrator's sex, status, and familiarity, shape the nature and magnitude of social learning. Given the important role of pair bonds in socially-monogamous animals, we predicted that these intimate relationships would promote the use of social information, and tested this hypothesis in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttat...

Significance Intelligence presents evolutionary biology with one of its greatest challenges. It has long been thought that species with relatively large brains for their body size are more intelligent. However, despite decades of research, the idea that brain size predicts cognitive abilities remains highly controversial; little experimental suppor...

Theoretically intelligence should evolve to help animals solve specific types of problems posed by the environment, but it remains unclear how environmental complexity or novelty facilitates the evolutionary enhancement of cognitive abilities, or whether domain-general intelligence can evolve in response to domain-specific selection pressures. The...

Innovative problem solving enables individuals to deal with novel social and ecological challenges. However, our understanding of the importance of innovation for animals in their natural habitat is limited because experimental investigations of innovation have historically focused on captive animals. To determine how captivity affects innovation,...

Innovative animals are those able to solve novel problems or invent novel solutions to existing problems. Despite the important ecological and evolutionary consequences of innovation, we still know very little about the traits that vary among individuals within a species to make them more or less innovative. Here we examine innovative problem solvi...

Game theory predicts that individuals should assess numbers of potential opponents before engaging in aggressive interactions, particularly when numerical odds can determine outcomes of such interactions. Spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta, live in fission-fusion societies in which extreme numerical imbalances can occur during intergroup conflicts, w...

La plaga bubónica es una enfermedad bacterial introducida para quien las pulgas (Siphonaptera) son los vectores principales. Los perros de la pradera de Utah (Cynomys parvidens) son muy susceptibles a la plaga, y colonias enteras generalmente desaparecen poco después de la llegada de la plaga. La inyección en las madrigueras con Pyraperm (un polvo...

It has long been recognized that vocal signals communicate information about the age, sex and affective state of callers. However, the mechanisms by which these types of information are communicated are less well understood. Here we investigated variation in the acoustic properties of the long-distance vocalizations, called 'whoops', emitted by fre...