Associative learning explains “intuitive statistics” in animals.

We review 58 experiments about "intuitive statistics" in mammals and birds, which investigate the animals' ability to make productive decisions when actions have probabilistic outcomes. We show that a stimulus-response associative model closely mirrors the animals' choices. The model reproduces qualitatively all results, and it accounts for an average 88% of the variance in 10 quantitative fits to data from 37 experiments with birds and mammals. The unexplained variance does not indicate processes more sophisticated than stimulus-response learning, as it either lies within measurement error or derives from animals making more mistakes than the stimulus-response model. These results confirm that associative learning models are a powerful tool in animal cognition research, often capable of unmatched quantitative accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).