Concept formation in American black bears, Ursus americanus
Despite their large relative brain size, bears have been neglected in studies of comparative cognition in comparison to their fellow carnivores, the social canines and pinnipeds. Here, three captive adult American black bears were presented with a series of natural concept discrimination tasks on a touchscreen computer, in which the discriminations varied in degree of abstraction. The more abstract discriminations could not be performed by attending to perceptual features of the stimuli alone. For instance, at the most abstract level, the bears were required to select images of animals rather than nonanimals, and exemplars within both categories were perceptually diverse.