[jack9]

The ability to have mental models requires some form of perceptive learning, as far as we know. This has seeped into AI study.

An analogy is just a described mental model. A "thing that is thrown" is something a dog can understand. I throw a ball or a bone or an orange mouse toy, it makes no difference to the dog...unless I "fake throw" or perform a "magic trick". I think the dog is likely to understand some part of calculus, given it has a sufficient number of neurons and was to use them optimally. The study into injecting information into a monkey's brain is particularly tantalizing toward that end.

A mental model is the primary tool necessary to escape constraints e.g. the ingenuity of Crows. Without external pressure or evolutionary pressure, humans haven't observed most animals get measurably smarter.