New paper: Animal Cognition, 25th Anniversary Issue

Debates on embodied cognition largely ignore the sense of smell. Yet chemosensation is mediated by the widest range animal sensorimotor systems, embedded in all physical environments. Jacobs LF (2023) The PROUST hypothesis: the embodiment of olfactory cognition. Anim...

New paper: Squirrel socioeconomics

Amanda Robin (Jacobs lab as undergrad, now completing her UCLA Ph.D. dissertation on squirrel ecology and cognition) and Lucia take on an invited challenge: review the best stuff published on squirrel cognition in the last 5 years (with limited self citation). In 2500...

New paper: Why olfaction matters

In a special issue on evolutionary neuroscience, Lucia proposes that the importance of nasal respiration in humans is a cognitive fossil from our fish ancestors, which explains the paradox of the dolphin. Jacobs LF (2022) How the evolution of air breathing shaped...

New paper: Parkour learning in squirrels

Squirrel Olympics! Published today in Science – Lucia began this project in 2014 when she was awarded a residency at the newly inaugurated art-science incubator  Stochastic Labs , to create art inspired by squirrel behavior. Instead, she recruited 6 students to...

New paper: Search strategies in dogs

Our first search dog study has just been published in a top olfaction journal, Chemical Senses. As we discuss in this paper, it is amazing how few studies on olfactory cognition, particularly olfactory spatial cognition, have been done on the domestic dog, considering...

The navigational nose

Published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology Jacobs, L. F. 2019. The navigational nose: a new hypothesis for the function of the human external pyramid. Journal of Experimental Biology. 222: jeb186924 doi: 10.1242/jeb.186924        PDF:  J Exper Biol 2019...