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Sharon Tang
Writing 39c Loving Animals
Professor Lynda Haas
May 15, 2016
Cognition in Animals
INTRODUCTION
Have you ever wondered about what your pets are thinking when they are looking at
you? Have you ever wondered what goes on in the minds of the animals you see? In The Animal
Mind article from TIME magazine, by Jeffrey Kluger, author of the article, starts off the article
by saying, Animals have brains, but do they have minds (Kluger 6). In this paper, I will be
writing a scientific review of literature about cognition in three different types of animals.
Cognition can be defined as a way of acquiring knowledge and understanding through different
life experiences, senses and thoughts. This paper will then build a bridge that will lead us to
advocate for the mistreatment of animas in animal testing. The three animals I will be focusing
on are cats, guinea pigs and rabbits.
CATS
Cats have long existed along side humans for over thousands of years, but how much do
we actually know about the cognition of the cat? Kristyn R. Vitale Shreve, National Science
Foundation Graduate Fellow at the Oregon State University Human-Animals Interaction Lab,
and Monique A. R. Udell, assistant professor of Animal and Rangeland Sciences at Oregon State
University, writes in this article about the several areas of cat cognition. Shreve and Udell write
about a study where, cats can distinguish the voice of their owners from strangers(Shreve,
Udell). Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka, from the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral

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Science at the University of Tokyo, conducted an experiment that involves 20 different cats to
see if the cats can recognize their owners voice. Saito and Shinozuka played three different
human voices calling the cat while it was in a room and the owner was not in sight of the cat.
The cat responded to the different voices by having different behavior changes, such as ear or
head movements. The results were that the cats were able to distinguish between the different
humans and that it, Suggests that domestic cats are able to recognize individual humans, who
are not conspecifics, through vocal communication as well as through face to face interaction
(Saito, Shinozuka 4). This shows that cats are able to recognize the different sounds of their
owners voice without having to see their owner face to face and it also shows signs of cognitive
ability to recognize their owner through their senses.

Figure 1: Holeboard-Box Design For Testing Cognitive Function

In agreement with Saito and Shinozuka, Sandra McCune, Joy Stevenson, Laura Fretwell,
and Amy Thompson of Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, and along with Daniel Simon Mills,
first Professor of Veterinary Behavioral Medicine at University of Lincoln in the United
Kingdom, writes in the article, Ageing does not significantly affect performance in a spatial
learning task in the domestic cat, that age does not affect the learning in cats. The test that the
researches performed on the cat involved the Holeboard-box design, as pictured above in Figure

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1. This design is used to see if cats have to ability to remember where the food was in three of
the cups on the side of the box within five minutes and have fewer than ten errors. In the second
part of this test, the food in the three different cups are covered with tissue paper to see if the
interference of the tissue paper would make it harder for the cat to learn and find where the food
was in the three cups. This part required the cat to find all three cups with the food in it within
five minutes and have fewer than eight errors. The cats remained in the study for twelve days and
then returned back into the room with all of the other cats. The results of this test showed that the
senior cats performed the best out of all the cats. This test shows that cats have the ability to
learn and their ability to learn is not even affected by the age of the cat (McCune, Stevenson,
Fretwell, Thompson, Mills).
GUNIEA PIGS
The next animal to discuss about cognition in is a guinea pig. Vera Brust, Postdoc
position at the Institute of Avian Research, and Anja Guenther, Researcher in the Department of
Animal Behaviour at Bielefeld University, writes in the article, Domestication effects on
behavioural traits and learning performance: comparing wild cavies to guinea pigs, about the
difference between guinea pigs and its wild ancestors, the cavies. Brust and Guenther writes in
this article, A reduction in brain size in domestic species is often thought to influence cognitive
performance negatively. Thus, at least in learning tasks, the wild congeners seem not to be able
to take advantage of their larger brain structures (Brust, Guenther 9). This shows that even
though being domesticated from its wild ancestors, guinea pigs or any other animal can still be
just as smart or even smarter than their wild ancestor. It does not mean that having a smaller
brain makes them any less intelligent. The test that the researchers performed involved the cavies
and the guinea pigs to knock over a cylinder to retrieve a cucumber slice. The guinea pigs or

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cavies had to the correct cylinder that had the correct corresponding shape in front of it. If the
correct symbol were not chosen in fifteen minutes, the test trial would be scored as passive. If the
correct symbol was chosen at least eight out of the ten consecutive trials, then the test will be
marked as drawn. After these initial learning trials were done, the reversal learning trials started
and the reward symbols got changed up. The animals were dropped out of the test is they could
not choose a symbol in twenty consecutive trials or did not learn the association in fifty trials.
These trials were used to measure the learning speed of the two animals (Brust, Guenther 4,5).
In the article, Wild genius domestic fool? Spatial learning abilities of wild and
domestic guinea pigs by Lars Lewejohann, Department of Behavioural Biology at the
University of Muenster in Germany, Thorsten Pickel, Norbert Sachser, and Sylvia Kaiser, is
about a test conducted on guinea pigs and wild cavies called the Morris water maze, shown in
figure 2 below. The Morris water maze is used to see the animals ability of spatial learning. The
Morris water maze test is see if the guinea pigs or the wild cavies can find the platform that is
placed in the middle of one of the four quadrants in the pool. The platform is hidden two
centimeters below the water surface and thirty centimeters away from the wall. The animals were
placed into the water, individually, to see how long it would take them to get to the platform. The
animals would get 45 seconds to get to the platform before it was placed on the platform for
fifteen seconds. In each trial, the animal could be placed on the cylinder up to three times if it did
not stay on the platform for fifteen seconds. The test last five days and after that the animals were
then placed back into the maze for sixty seconds without the platform being inside, to see if the
animals could remember which quadrant the platform was in. The ones who spent most of the
time in the quadrant that previously had the platform remembered where it was while others that
did not, just spent an equal amount of time in the all of the quadrants. After this the platform was

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placed in the opposite quadrant that it use to be in to see if the animals can relearn the new
position of the platform. The results to these tests were that the guinea pigs out performed the
wild cavies. In the article it says that, Overall our findings indicate that these animals are
suitable for investigations of learning and memory (Lewejohann, Pickel, Sachaser, Kaiser).
This shows that guinea pigs and wild cavies both have the ability to think and remember on how
to get the platform in the maze.

Figure 2: The Morris Water Maze

RABBITS
The last animals that we will be focusing on are rabbits. In a paper, Cognition Without
Concepts, written by Linda B. Smith, distinguished professor and Chancellors Professor of
Psychological and Brain Science at Indiana University and Susan S. Jones, professor emeritus in
the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, writes about the study
of olfactory catrgories in rabbits from a study by W.J. Freeman and his colleagues. The study was
about, the activity across groups of neurons in the olfactory bulb, they found stable behavioral
categories that emerged from dynamic and changing patterns of activity (Smith, Jones 187).
This study showed a rabbit connecting certain smell with another different type of activity. An
example written about in the paper, was the rabbits associating the smell of sawdust with the

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scent of banana. The rabbit had different behavioral responses to the sawdust as before it learned
about the scent of the banana. This shows that the rabbits have an ability to remember the smell
of one item to relate to the smell of another item. This is very similar to how people connect
certain smells, places, sounds and etc. to certain memories.
In the article, Neurological and neurobehavioral assessment of experimental
subarachnoid hemorrhage, by Hyojin Jeon, Jinglu Ai, Mohamed Sabri, Asma Tariq, Xueyuan
Shang, Gang Chen and R Loch Macdonald, Division of Neurosurgery, St. Michael's Hospital,
Keenan Research Centre in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's Hospital and
Department of Surgery, University of Toronto (all listed), written a paper with a chart that states
a test called, Discriminative avoidance/approach task, which measures a rabbits cognition in
the number of training session is it needed for the animal to meet the criteria the researchers have
set out for the test. This test shows how, Rabbits learn to prevent a foot-shock by stepping in a
large activity wheel in response to a shock-predictive tone and they ignore different tone which
does not predict the shock (Jeon et al.). This test is show if rabbits can learn and remember
which sound is made so they can step on the wheel and not get shocked. They are taught to
recognize a specific sound to tell them to step on the wheel.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, these animals do have the capability to understand what we are doing to
them. These animals are not mindless creature and should not be subjected to the kinds of torture
they have to endure in the laboratories where they are being tested on. This brings up the
question if it is right to test products on animals. These animals have a mind of their own just
like we as humans do. We have to advocate for the fair rights for these animals who cannot speak
for themselves.

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Work Cited
Brust, Vera, and Anja Guenther. "Domestication Effects On Behavioural Traits And Learning
Performance: Comparing Wild Cavies To Guinea Pigs." Animal Cognition 18.1 (2015):
99-109. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 May 2016.
Jeon, Hyojin, Jinglu Ai, Mohamed Sabri, Asma Tariq, Xueyuan Shang, Gang Chen and R Loch
Macdonald. Neurological and neurobehavioral assessment of experimental subarachnoid
hemorrhage. BioMed Central. BMC Neuroscience. Web. 14 May 1026.
Kluger, Jeffrey. Intelligence. TIME: The Animal Mind. 14 Nov. 2014: 6-19. Print.
Lewejohann, Lars, Thorsten Pickel, Norbert Sachser, and Sylvia Kaiser. Wild genius domestic
fool? Spatial learning abilities of wild and domestic guinea pigs. BioMed Central.
Frontiers in Zoology. Web. 14 May 2016.
McCune, Sandra, Joy Stevenson, Laura Fretwell, Amy Thompson, and Daniel Simon Mills.
"Ageing does not significantly affect performance in a spatial learning task in the
domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus)." Applied Animal Behaviour Science 112.3 (2008):
345-356. Web. 14 May 2016.
Saito, Atsuko, and Kazutaka Shinozuka. "Vocal recognition of owners by domestic cats (Felis
catus)." Animal cognition 16.4 (2013): 685-690. Web. 14 May 2016.
Shreve, Kristyn R. Vitale, and Monique A.R. Udell. "Whats inside your cats head? A review of
cat (Felis silvestris catus) cognition research past, present and future." Animal cognition
18.6 (2015): 1195-1206. Web. 14 May 2016.
Smith, Linda B., and Susan S. Jones. "Cognition without concepts." Cognitive Development 8.2
(1993): 181-188.

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