New papers out – Reviews

Georgina Glaser
Friday 6 May 2016

We’ve had some more publishing activity from the Healy lab, recently in the form of reviews! Well done Alexis, David, Maria, Lauren, and Sue!

 

What Can Nest-Building Birds Teach Us?

Photos by Ida Bailey (a) and Kate Morgan (b) and (c).
The structures that animals build are extraordinarily diverse, particularly nests built by birds. As part of the annual edition of Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, members of the nest building team (Alexis, Lauren and Sue) review 150 years of observational and experimental data to show that bird nest building is a useful model for the study of learning, memory and brain-behaviour relationships. To read more, click here.
 

 

Why study cognition in the wild (and how to test it)?

A lot of what we know about animal cognition comes from studies in the lab, but researchers (including us!) are getting more and more curious about the role of cognition outside of the lab, studying animals in their natural habitats. As part of a recent special issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, we (David, Maria, and Sue) have written a review looking at why researchers are so interested in cognition in the wild, how we go about testing it, and some of the challenges that people face by working in the wild.

We particularly talk about some of these topics in the context of our own work on the spatial and temporal cognition of wild hummingbirds, so if you like that work, and want to check this out too, you can read the review here.

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