Nicola S. Clayton
Nicola S. Clayton FRS is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Scientist in Residence at Rambert Dance Company. She is world-renowned for her landmark discoveries in avian intelligence, comparative cognition, and non-human mental life.
Clayton’s pioneering experiments with Western scrub-jays provided the first definitive empirical evidence of “episodic-like memory” and mental time travel in non-human animals, demonstrating that jays remember what, where, and when specific food caches were hidden and adjust their caching behavior according to social context and future needs.
Clayton’s work overturned mammalian chauvinism in neuroscience, proving that complex conscious cognition and temporal planning can emerge through divergent evolutionary pathways in avian brains lacking a mammalian neocortex, providing key insights for substrate-independent intelligence and synthetic cognition.
Known for. Comparative cognition, episodic-like memory in corvids, mental time travel in animals, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
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