While humans have long viewed animal thought as purely instinctual, modern comparative cognition reveals a complex spectrum of mental abilities across the animal kingdom. The question of whether animals “think like humans” is less about identical thought processes and more about identifying shared and unique cognitive tools forged by evolution. Thinking encompasses a wide array of processes, from simple memory recall and spatial awareness to abstract concepts like self-recognition and future planning. Scientists now explore how different species navigate their world through intelligence, moving beyond instinct to demonstrate flexible, learned, and sometimes complex problem-solving behaviors.
Shared Cognitive Tools: Memory and Problem-Solving
Many species exhibit foundational cognitive tools that enable them to interact successfully with their environments, particularly regarding memory and practical problem-solving. Advanced memory is found in food-caching birds, such as the California scrub jay. These birds demonstrate “episodic-like memory,” recalling the specific what, where, and when of a past caching event.
Scrub jays remember which food items spoil quickly (e.g., perishable wax worms) and recover them sooner than non-perishable nuts, showing a flexible awareness of time and decay. Complex problem-solving, particularly tool use, is present in various non-human species. New Caledonian crows, for instance, are known for manufacturing tools, trimming leaves and twigs into hooked angling tools to extract insect larvae from tree holes.
These corvids also display sequential tool use, solving multi-step tasks that require them to use one tool to retrieve a second tool, which is then used to access a reward. This behavior suggests functional intelligence, involving planning and the understanding of physical causality in a practical context. This demonstration of flexible intelligence in both primates and birds challenges the idea that advanced cognitive abilities are confined to a single evolutionary lineage.
The Role of Self-Awareness and Intentionality
Beyond practical skills, some animals display higher-order cognitive functions that approach the human capacity for understanding internal states. The Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test assesses visual self-awareness by requiring an animal to recognize a mark on its body visible only in a reflection. Species that have passed this test include great apes, dolphins, elephants, and even European magpies, suggesting a capacity to perceive the reflection as an image of themselves.
Self-recognition is often considered a prerequisite for Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—to oneself and others. While true ToM, involving the understanding of false beliefs, remains largely a human trait, many animals exhibit behaviors suggestive of “perspective-taking” or tactical intentionality. Chimpanzees, for example, demonstrate an understanding of a competitor’s visual perception when competing for food. Subordinate chimpanzees will preferentially approach food along a route that is hidden from a dominant competitor’s view, or even actively conceal their approach.
Some animals also show evidence of mental time travel, or planning for future needs. Scrub jays, for instance, will re-cache food if they have been observed by another bird while caching, but only if they themselves have experience as a thief. This action suggests they are simulating the perspective of the observer, predicting that the observer will steal the food later, and adjusting their behavior based on that prediction. This strategic behavior points to a flexible awareness of what others know or see.
Communication Versus Language
The distinction between animal communication and human language rests on structural elements like syntax and generativity. Animal communication systems are specialized but “closed,” meaning the signals are tied to specific contexts or emotional states. Vervet monkeys use acoustically distinct alarm calls for different predators. The leopard call causes monkeys to run into trees, the eagle call prompts them to look up, and the snake call causes them to look down into the grass.
The honeybee waggle dance is a symbolic system where the duration of the waggle run communicates the distance to a food source, and the angle of the dance relative to gravity indicates the direction in relation to the sun. However, these systems lack the flexibility and generative power of human language.
Attempts to teach human-like language to non-human primates, such as the bonobo Kanzi, have demonstrated semantic understanding. Kanzi learned to communicate using a keyboard with visual symbols (lexigrams) and comprehended thousands of spoken English words. While he could understand word order better than chance, the difference lies in the inability of these animals to master complex syntax (grammar) or generativity—the capacity to combine a finite set of words into an infinite number of sentences.
Empathy and Emotional Depth
Animal emotional lives are understood to be deeper than previously assumed, supported by neurobiological similarities and social behaviors. Many mammals share homologous brain structures, such as parts of the limbic system, that are associated with emotional processing in humans. Neurochemicals like oxytocin, which plays a role in human bonding and trust, have been implicated in social behaviors across various species.
Emotional contagion, the spreading of emotional states between individuals, is widespread in social species. Empathy is evident in behaviors like consolation. Great apes and other primates frequently console distressed group members through hugging or grooming.
Studies on prairie voles demonstrated that these rodents will groom stressed conspecifics to lessen their anxiety, a behavior that was abolished when an oxytocin receptor antagonist was administered. This suggests the biological mechanisms for basic, affective empathy are shared across many mammals. Grief-like behaviors are also documented; elephants perform “death rituals” by gathering around and touching the remains of deceased herd members.