Insect cognition describes the mental capacities and study of those capacities in insects. The field developed from comparative psychology where early studies focused more on animal behavior. Researchers have examined insect cognition in bees, fruit flies, and wasps.  

Research questions consist of experiments aimed to evaluate insects' abilities such as perception, emotions attention, memory (wasp multiple nest), spatial cognition, tools use, problem solving, and concepts. Unlike in animal behavior the concept of group cognition plays a big part in insect studies. It is hypothesized some insect classes like ants and bees think with a group cognition to function within their societies; more recent studies show that individual cognition exists and plays a role in overall group cognitive task.

Insect cognition experiments have been more prevalent in the past decade than prior. It is logical for the understanding of cognitive capacities as adaptations to differing ecological niches under the Cognitive faculty by species when analyzing behaviors, this means viewing behaviors as adaptations to an individual's environment and not weighing them more advanced when compared to other different individuals.

Insects inhabit many diverse and complex environments within which they must find food. Cognition shapes how an insect comes to find its food. The particular cognitive abilities used by insects in finding food has been the focus of much scientific inquiry. The social insects are often study subjects and much has been discovered about the intelligence of insects by investigating the abilities of bee species. Fruit flies are also common study subjects.

Through learning, insects can increase their foraging efficiency, decreasing the time spent searching for food which allows for more time and energy to be invested in other fitness related activities, such as searching for mates or hosts. Depending on the ecology of the insect, certain cues may be used to learn in identifying food sources more quickly. Over evolutionary time, insects may develop evolved learning biases that reflect the food source they feed on.

Biases in learning allow insects to quickly associate relevant features of the environment that are related to food. For example, bees have an unlearned preference for radiating and symmetric patterns — common features of natural flowers bees forage on. Bees that have no foraging experience tend to have an unlearned preference for the colours that an experienced forager would learn faster. These colours tend to be those of highly rewarding flowers in that particular environment.

In addition to more typical cues like color and odor, insects are able to use time as a foraging cue. Time is a particularly important cue for pollinators. Pollinators forage on flowers which tend to vary predictably in time and space, depending on the flower species, pollinators can learn the timing of blooming of flower species to develop more efficient foraging routes. Bees learn at which times and in which areas sites are rewarding and change their preference for particular sites based on the time of day.

These time-based preferences have been shown to be tied to a circadian clock in some insects. In the absence of external cues honeybees will still show a shift in preference for a reward depending on time strongly implicating an internal time-keeping mechanism, i.e. the circadian clock, in modulating the learned preference.