Abstract
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 individual variation, in the expression of cognitive abilities. The field of animal cognition, however, is still being influenced by some historical tendencies. For example, primates and birds are still the majority of study species in the field of animal cognition. Studies of diverse taxa improve the generalizability of our results, are critical for testing evolutionary hypotheses, and open new paths for understanding cognition in species with vastly different morphologies. In this paper, we review the current state of knowledge of cognition in mammalian carnivores. We discuss the advantages of studying cognition in Carnivorans and the immense progress that has been made across many cognitive domains in both lab and field studies of carnivores. We also discuss the current constraints that are associated with studying carnivores. Finally, we explore new directions for future research in studies of carnivore cognition.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our funding sources and our universities for their support of our research. We would like to thank all of the authors whose work we have included here. We would like to thank the members of the Animal Behavior and Cognition lab at both the University of Wyoming and the University of British Columbia for their insightful discussions on the cognition of Carnivorans over the years. Finally, we would like to thank Kay Holekamp for her mentorship and for being a pioneer of studies of the behavior and cognition of mammalian carnivores.
Funding
SBA is supported by the University of British Columbia, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (DGECR-2022–00333 and RGPIN-2022–03590), and the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (Project # 42035). HJG is supported by the Special UBC Graduate Scholarship-FRST Doctoral Fellowship #6372. CMS is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute Graduate Research Enhancement Grant.
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SBA had the original idea for the article. All authors contributed to the literature search, original writing, and editing of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. CMS collected data and created the figures and supplemental material on meta-analysis methods. All authors contributed to figure design and editing.
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Benson-Amram, S., Griebling, H.J. & Sluka, C.M. The current state of carnivore cognition. Anim Cogn 26, 37–58 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01709-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01709-2