It was once taken for granted that learning in animals and man could be explained with a simple set of general learning rules, but over the last hundred years, a substantial amount of evidence has been accumulated that points in a quite different direction. In animal learning theory, the laws of learning are no longer considered general. Instead, it has been necessary to explain behaviour in te...

Learning to navigate plays an integral role in the survival of humans and other animals. Research on human navigation has largely focused on how we deliberately map out our world. However, many of us also have experiences of navigating on "autopilot" or out of habit. Animal models have identified this cognitive mapping versus habit learning as two dissociable systems for learning a space--a hip...

Social learning theory studies the mechanisms by which an agent learns from its interactions with conspecific agents. Examples of social learning can be found in the animal kingdom, and especially in primate societies, whereby, for instance, one agent learns new skills by the observation and imitation of another agent’s behaviour. At present there is no widely agreed definition of imitation exi...

The paper presents a system LABAQM for the analysis of laboratory animal behaviour based on qualitative modelling. We are dealing with the cognitive phase of the laboratory animal behaviour analysis as a part of the pharmacological experiments. The system is based on the quantitative data from the tracking application and incomplete domain background knowledge. The LABAQM system operates in two...

We posit a new geometric perspective to define, detect, and classify inherent patterns of collective behaviour across a variety of animal species. We show that machine learning techniques, and specifically the isometric mapping algorithm, allow the identification and interpretation of different types of collective behaviour in five social animal species. These results offer a first glimpse at t...

I'd like to begin with some ideas about animal comunication and I want to consider what may be innate, what theories of language learning had been performed so far?, and what similarities or dissimilarities might have to be analysed between the acquisition and the learning situation in order to clarify this point. Thus, I'd like to begin with some considerations about THE animal communication s...