Cephalopod complex cognition

•Cephalopods have a distributed nervous system in brain, arms and skin.•Cephalopods are short term learners and long term learners in exploration, imprinting and play.•Cephalopod problem-solving strategies include combinations of learning and tactics.•Subsystems integrate and coordinate but the brain tracks results; not open loop.

Cephalopods, especially octopuses, offer a different model for the development of complex cognitive operations. They are phylogenetically distant from the mammals and birds that we normally think of as 'intelligent' and without the pervasive social interactions and long lives that we associate with this capacity. Additionally, they have a distributed nervous system - central brain, peripheral coordination of arm actions and a completely separate skin appearance system based on muscle-controlled chromatophores. Recent research has begun to show how these apparently separate systems are coordinated. Learning and cognition are used toward prey, in antipredator actions and in courtship. These examples show how they attain complex cognition in Emery & Clayton's (2004) categories of flexibility, causal reasoning, imagination and prospection.