Can animals understand options?
Abstract
Giving captive animals control over their environment is increasingly considered an important avenue to promoting welfare. However it has remained unclear to what extent different species might understand the choices they face. This project aims to examine the capacity to consider options and reason logically about possibilities in two prime candidates of animal intelligence: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). A series of progressively more complex tasks aims to establish their competences and limits. The results of this project will have significant implications for our current understanding of non-human cognition and inform animal welfare considerations.
