Animal cognition is the study of the mental capacities of animals and includes the study of animal conditioning and learning.

According to a study carried out by Jason Bruck, an animal behaviourist, dolphins have the longest memories in the Animal Kingdom. Animal language acquisition, attempting to discern or understand the degree to which animal cognistics can be revealed by linguistics-related study, has been controversial among cognitive linguists.

The categories that have been developed to analyse human memory, have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory have been detected in animals, particularly monkeys. However most progress has been made in the analysis of spatial memory; some of this work has sought to clarify the physiological basis of spatial memory and the role of the hippocampus; other work has explored the spatial memory of animals whose ecological niches require them to remember the locations of thousands of caches,

Memory has been widely investigated in foraging honeybees, Apis mellifera, which use both transient short-term working memory that is non-feeder specific. Memory induced in a free-flying honeybee by a single learning trial lasts for days and, by three learning trials, for a lifetime.Slugs, Limax flavus, have a short-term memory of approximately 1 min and long-term memory of 1 month

Based on the encephalization quotient, the brightest animals on the planet are humans, followed great apes, porpoises, and elephants. The dog is close behind elephants in its EQ. Descending down the list we find cats lower than dogs, followed by horses, sheep, mice, rats and rabbits. As a general rule, animals that hunt for a living (like canines) are smarter than strict vegetarians (you don’t need much intelligence to outsmart a leaf of lettuce).

Some species amaze us with their human-like abilities. Others amaze us because their abilities are so different from our own. Each species is unique in its constellation of cognitive capacities because evolution has tailored these capacities for solving the problems animals face in their physical and social worlds.