Abstract:

Animal innovation has important ecological and evolutionary significance and provides a reference to the research on human creativity and inspiration. This review firstly summaries the definitions of animal innovation from different researchers in the recent years. Then it introduces the progress of animal innovation theories. Following that, the internal factors that affect animal innovation, i.e. exploration, neophobia, learning ability and perseverance, are summarized particularly. In the end, neural mechanisms underlying animal innovation are discussed in terms of related brain regions and neurotransmitters and potential future research areas of the animal innovation are proposed.

Key words: animal creativity, animal innovation, exploration, neophobia, learning, neural mechanism