Studying small brains to understand the building blocks of cognition

•Insects offer experimental advantages for the study of basic elements of cognition.•Insect behaviors suggest the use of sophisticated internal representations.•Honeybee decision-making reveals capacity for generalization and working memory.•Flies create and maintain internal representation of angular orientation.

Cognition encompasses a range of higher-order mental processes, such as attention, working memory, and model-based decision-making. These processes are thought to involve the dynamic interaction of multiple central brain regions. A mechanistic understanding of such computations requires not only monitoring and manipulating specific neural populations during behavior, but also knowing the connectivity of the underlying circuitry. These goals are experimentally challenging in mammals, but are feasible in numerically simpler insect brains. In Drosophila melanogaster in particular, genetic tools enable precisely targeted physiology and optogenetics in actively behaving animals. In this article we discuss how these advantages are increasingly being leveraged to study abstract neural representations and sensorimotor computations that may be relevant for cognition in both insects and mammals.