What field studies learning, memory, and problem-solving in non-human animals?

The field that studies learning, memory, and problem-solving in non-human animals is animal cognition.

Animal cognition examines how animals acquire, process, store, and use information. Its subjects include perception, learning, memory, spatial reasoning, communication, tool use, decision-making, social knowledge, and problem-solving. Because animals cannot describe their private experiences in language, researchers infer mental processes from carefully controlled behavior.

The field grew from comparative psychology, ethology, and animal-learning research. Behaviorist experiments emphasized observable stimulus-response patterns, while later cognitive researchers asked whether an animal represented locations, remembered past events, used tools, or solved a novel problem. Modern studies combine laboratory experiments with field observations so that results can be tested both under controlled conditions and in ecologically meaningful settings.

Animal cognition is broader than ethology, which primarily studies behavior in biological and ecological context, and it is not the same as neuroethology, which investigates the neural mechanisms underlying natural behavior. “Comparative cognition” is a closely related label, but animal cognition is the standard broad answer for this question.