Man is used to considering himself the smartest creature on Earth. Despite his very weak physical capabilities, he controls the lion's share of the land and makes attempts to "enslave" the oceans. As for the animals, their importance has been downplayed, allegedly due to a lack of intelligence. But do not underestimate the mental abilities of our smaller brothers, because some of them are not as stupid as they seem at first glance.
Although animals do not have enough intelligence to call them "intelligent", some of them are definitely smarter and smarter than others. For example, pigs. They are easy to learn, have excellent memory, and perform well on intelligence tests.
A certain level of intelligence is seen in parrots, in particular, in the gray. Yes, in most cases they simply repeat the sounds they hear without understanding their meaning, but this is due to the lack of proper training. It has been proven that they are able to associate words with objects that they denote, as well as perceive the concept of shape, color, serial number.
Squirrels are not only smart but also cunning. They learned long ago that man is a source of food. If you once fed a squirrel, it is likely that the next day it will wait for you at the same place, “recognize” and take the food again. And she will take as much as you give - she simply hides the rest of the food, memorizing the "cache".
"Man's best friend" - a dog - a very smart creature. With proper training, she is able to understand 250 words and gestures, count to five, and perform the simplest mathematical operations. It is worth mentioning that the smartest breed of dog is poodles.
Of course, this rating could not do without cats. Domestic cats are very intelligent - their main hallmark of intelligence is the ability to adapt. Moreover, if your murka does not follow the command that you taught her, this does not mean that she has forgotten her. Rather, she simply does not want to fulfill it: the ability to say “no” is also a sign of intelligence and willpower.
There are legends about the mind of ravens - these birds are able to do incredible things to get to food, for example, cracking a nut, placing it under the wheels of a car, etc. When scientists decided to check whether the raven was really endowed with intelligence, they began to give the bird water to drink from a deep jug, which he could not reach with his beak. The subject raven thought of throwing various objects into the container to raise the water level. In general, these birds will definitely find a way out of any situation!
The one you hardly expected to see in this ranking is octopuses! These marine invertebrates are blessed with a very impressive brain in relation to body weight. They are trainable, have a good memory, distinguish geometric shapes, recognize people, get used to those who feed them. Some mystics believe that octopuses are able to predict the future: what is only the epic with Paul, the "football oracle".
The top three "smartest" animals are opened by elephants. They recognize themselves in a mirror image, which is considered a sign of self-awareness, have excellent long-term memory and orientation on the ground, know how to use tools (for example, branches as "fly bats"), distinguish many sounds, and most importantly, they are very susceptible to the death of their fellows. These giants know how to draw conclusions and empathize!
Chimpanzees, especially bonobos, are very intelligent creatures and the closest human relatives in the animal kingdom. Although chimpanzees cannot speak due to the structure of the vocal apparatus, they are able to communicate with their hands in sign language, use words in a figurative sense, and create new concepts by combining known words. They are capable of making tools (peeling leaves from sticks, sharpening sticks and stones) and have a sense of humor. If you put a baby chimpanzee and a child next to them, then up to 2 years of age you will not find any intellectually difference between them (sometimes the chimpanzee turns out to be even smarter).
Perhaps the most powerful among animals are endowed with dolphins. And no wonder! The dolphin's brain weighs about 1,700 g, while in humans it weighs 1,400 g, while the dolphin has twice as many convolutions in the cerebral cortex as in humans. According to the latest scientific data from cognitive ethology and zoopsychology, dolphins not only have a “vocabulary” (up to 14,000 sound signals) that allows them to communicate with each other, but also have self-awareness, “social consciousness” and emotional empathy. Moreover, each dolphin has its own name, which it responds to when its relatives refer to it! Obviously, humans are not the only "intelligent" creatures, perhaps much more aggressive.
The coefficient of encephalization acts as a criterion (it stands next to each other in parentheses next to each name of the animal).
This furious scientific term is intended to roughly characterize the development of the intelligence of an animal.
The encephalization index is used to identify developmental trends as well as the potential of different species.
Sheep (0.7)
On the 10th place is the sheep! The animal was domesticated about 8000 years ago in the Middle East. The sheep does not show high intelligence and it will not be possible to communicate with it in sign language. An obvious outsider.
Horse (0.8)
Horses have excellent memory. Also, in these animals, conditioned reflexes are excellently developed and fixed. The practical use of horses is based on this.
Cat (0.9)
Some researchers believe that the intelligence of cats is close to that of two-year-old children. Cats are able to adopt some of the behavior of the owners and adapt to it.
Protein (1.0)
The squirrels nestled comfortably between the cats and dogs. Thanks to their intelligence, they have learned to survive well in the wild. Researchers have found that brave eared eared mushrooms even dry mushrooms for the winter.
Squirrels are the gurus of winter storage. Not sure how to store nuts? Share them with squirrels. Not the fact that they will return, but they will keep it for sure.
Dog (1,2)
Psychological researchers Elliston Reid and John Pillay of Wofford College in Spartanburg were able to train the border collie named Chaser to verbalize over 1,000 objects.
The dog is also able to classify the function and shape of objects, which is comparable to the intellectual abilities of a three-year-old child.
African Elephant (1.4)
The brain of an African elephant weighs about 5 kg. This is a record. A whale has a smaller brain than an elephant! Scientists believe that elephants can experience grief, joy, compassion; developed cooperation, self-awareness, and playfulness.
Studies have shown that elephants are superior to humans at tracking multiple objects in space. Ample data has already been collected to demonstrate the altruism of elephants in relation to other species, such as rescuing dogs.
These massive giants observe funeral rituals in honor of their dead.
Gorilla (1.6)
The intelligence of gorillas is an order of magnitude lower than that of chimpanzees. But gorillas have developed primitive communication, which is based on 16 sound combinations. Some gorillas have learned sign language.
Igrunka (1.8)
This animal lives in the forests of the Amazon. Igrunks are quite common and are not endangered. The ratio of the volume of the brain to the body of a primate is one of the largest.
Chimpanzee (2.2)
Chimpanzees have learned to communicate in sign language. They are able to use words in a figurative sense, they can create new concepts by combining well-known words, for example: "lighter" = "bottle" + "match".
A distinctive feature of chimpanzees is their sense of humor. These monkeys actively use tools, and also recognize themselves in the mirror. In addition to using tools, chimpanzees have learned to create primitive tools.
For example, they make special sticks for catching ants.
Big Dolphin (5.2)
Now for a surprise: it turns out that in humans, the encephalization coefficient is 7.6. People have not gone too far from dolphins. What can a dolphin do? Much.
The dolphin learned to correlate the image of his body with the structure of the human body, using analogies. Knows how to understand new sequences in an artificial language.
Able to generalize rules and build abstract concepts. Parses symbols for different parts of the body. Understands pointing gestures. Recognizes himself in the mirror.
The beginning of the scientific study of the intellectual abilities of animals, as well as their psyche in general, was laid by Charles Darwin in his book "The Origin of Species and Natural Selection". His student George-John Romans continued his studies, which resulted in the book "The Mind of Animals". Romans' approach is anthropomorphic and lacks attention to the rigor of methodology. Animal Minds is based on isolated incidents that seemed worthy of attention to the author, his readers, or friends, rather than systematic, purposeful observation. Despite the dubious scientific nature, this approach has become widespread. Among his adherents are Maximilian Perty and William Lauder Lindsay.
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The results obtained on the basis of this "anecdotal approach" did not stand up to verification and were refuted by experiments. At the beginning of the 20th century, the opposite approach was widely accepted in the animal behavioral sciences. This was associated with the emergence of the scientific school of behaviorism. Behaviorists attached great importance to the scientific rigor and accuracy of the methods used. But at the same time, they, in principle, excluded the possibility of studying the psyche of animals. One of the founders of behaviorism is Conwy Lloyd Morgan, a British psychologist.
He, in particular, owns the famous rule known as Lloyd Morgan's Canon.
... this or that action can in no case be interpreted as a result of the manifestation of any higher mental function, if it can be explained on the basis of the animal's ability that occupies a lower level on the psychological scale
Close in spirit to behaviorism was the concept of the nervous activity of the Soviet physiologist I.P. Pavlov. In Pavlov's laboratory, there was even a ban on anthropomorphisms. Not all behaviorists shared the ideas of radical, "reductionist" behaviorism, which reduced all the diversity of behavior to a stimulus-response scheme. These scientists include Edward Tolman, an American psychologist.
With the accumulation of empirical material regarding animal behavior, naturalists and zoopsychologists, it was found that not all behavioral acts can be explained by instincts or learning.
The intellectual abilities of animals
“… It is extremely difficult to pinpoint exactly which animals can be considered intellectual behavior and which ones can not. Obviously, we can only talk about higher vertebrates, but obviously not only about primates, as it was until recently was accepted. "
K.E. Fabry
The intellectual abilities of animals other than humans include the ability to solve non-trivial behavioral problems (thinking). Intellectual behavior is closely related to other components of behavior such as perception, manipulation, learning, and instinct. The complexity of a behavioral act is not a sufficient basis for recognizing the presence of intelligence in an animal. The complex nest-building behavior of some birds is determined by innate programs (instincts). The main difference between intellectual activity is plasticity, which can significantly increase the chances of survival in a rapidly changing environment.
The development of intelligence can be evidenced by both behavior and the structure of the brain. Intelligence tests for primates, similar to those used in widely used intelligence tests for humans, have become very popular. As an example of the application of the second approach, we can cite the encephalization coefficient and the Dunbar number, which links the development of the neocortex and the size of the herd in primates.
Intelligence is the pinnacle of the development of the psyche of animals. At present, there is evidence of the presence of rudiments of intellectual activity in a wide number of vertebrates. Nevertheless, intelligence in the animal kingdom is a rather rare phenomenon. Some researchers define the mind as a property of complex self-regulating systems.
The ability of ants to solve complex problems is associated with the emergent properties of an anthill as a "superorganism", while individual ants can transmit 6 bits in 200 seconds to describe the path to food.
Prerequisites
Memory and learning
Learning combines all the variety of forms of behavior modification under the influence of environmental factors - the formation of conditioned reflexes, imprinting, habituation, training (even innate forms of behavior require some refinement) and latent learning. The ability to learn is inherent in almost all animals, with the exception of the most primitive.
Learning provides flexibility in behavior and is one of the prerequisites for the formation of intelligence.
Manipulation
Manifestations of motor activity, covering all forms of active movement by animals of the components of the environment in space (as opposed to locomotion - the movement of the animals themselves in space). In higher animals, manipulation is carried out mainly with the help of the oral apparatus and the forelimbs (examination of objects, nutrition, protection, constructive actions, etc.). Manipulation and manipulative problem solving give the animal the most profound, diverse and essential for mental development information about the objective components of the environment and the processes occurring in it. In the course of evolution, the progressive development of manipulation played a decisive role in the development of the cognitive abilities of animals and formed the basis for the formation of their intelligence. In the fossil primates - human ancestors, manipulation, especially with "biologically neutral" objects, was the basis for the emergence of labor activity.
Higher mental functions
Language
The key features of language as a communication system are development in the process of socialization, the arbitrary character of signs, the presence of grammar and openness. The communicative systems of animals correspond to individual features of the language. An example is the well-known bee dance. The shape of its elements (wagging, moving in a circle) is separated from the content (direction, distance, characteristics of the feed source).
Although there is evidence that some talking birds are able to use their imitative abilities for the needs of interspecific communication, the actions of talking birds (myna, macaw parrots) do not meet this definition.
One of the approaches to learning the language of animals is the experimental teaching of an intermediary language. Similar experiments with great apes have become very popular. Since, due to anatomical and physiological features, monkeys are not able to reproduce the sounds of human speech, the first attempts to teach them the human language failed.
| Some experiments in teaching language to monkeys | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Researcher Name | Animal name | Language | ||
| Allen and Beatrice Gardners |
Washoe (chimpanzee) | Language of the deaf and dumb (Amslen) | ||
| David Primack and Anne James Primack |
Sarah (chimpanzee), Elizabeth, Peony | Specially designed (curly tokens were used to denote English words) | ||
| Dewane Rumbo (eng. Duane Rumbaugh) |
Lana | Specially designed artificial language based on lexigrams. |
||
| Francine Patterson | Coco (gorilla) | sign language (about a thousand signs) | ||
The first experiment using a sign language mediator was undertaken by the Gardners. They proceeded from the assumption of Robert Yerkes about the inability of chimpanzees to articulate the sounds of human language. Chimpanzee Washoe showed the ability to combine signs like "you" + "tickle" + "I", "give" + "sweet". The monkeys at the University of Nevada Zoo in Reno used amslen to communicate with each other. The language of gophers is quite complex and consists of a variety of whistles, chirps and clicks of varying frequency and volume. Interspecies communication is also possible in animals.
Joint schooling hunting is widespread among mammals and some birds; there are also cases of interspecific coordinated hunting.
Gun activity
For a long time it was believed that the ability to create and use tools of labor is inherent only to humans. Currently, there is a large amount of evidence of the active and purposeful use of tools by animals.
Thinking
Particular interest in the problems of thinking in animals was observed at the dawn of the formation of comparative psychology. The main literature on this topic belongs to the classics, the most famous of which is Wolfgang Köhler. At that time, experiments were carried out mainly on primates. Koehler, for example, used chimpanzees. It has now been reliably established that thinking is not unique to primates. Recently, data have been obtained on the ability of the New Caledonian crows to establish cause-and-effect relationships. The African gray parrot female has shown hatching ability by exclusion.
Abstraction
Classification and generalization
The product of mental activity, in which reflections of the general signs and qualities of the phenomena of reality are presented. The types of generalization correspond to the types of thinking. Generalization also acts as a means of mental activity. The simplest generalizations consist in uniting, grouping objects on the basis of a separate, random attribute (syncretic unions). More complicated is a complex generalization, in which a group of objects are combined into a single whole for different reasons.
Math ability
According to modern concepts, the foundations of mathematical abilities in humans and animals have a common foundation. Although animals are incapable of operating with abstract mathematical concepts, they can confidently evaluate and compare the number of different objects. Similar abilities are noted in primates and some birds, in particular, ravens. Moreover, primates are capable of performing arithmetic operations.
The fairness of Morgan's canon, as well as the importance of scrupulous evaluation of methods, is well illustrated by the story of Clever Hans, a horse with exceptional mathematical abilities. Clever Hans was capable of performing mathematical calculations and tapping out the answer with his hoof. For thirteen years, Hans publicly demonstrated his abilities (including in the absence of the owner, which excluded the possibility of training), until in 1904 Oskar Pfungst was dumb. Oskar Pfungst did not establish that the horse responded to subtle movements of the examiners.
Self-awareness
Common misconceptions
The intelligence of an animal is closely related to other forms of behavior and features of biology. A common misconception when considering animal behavior is anthropomorphism - endowing animals with human traits. Anthropomorphism was characteristic of the early explorers.
Open questions
Problematic
An additional obstacle in the process of studying and discussing the obtained research results are both obvious and not studied, not discovered, differences in the perception of the world (between a human experimenter and an animal object of the experiment), often anatomically and physiologically determined by evolutionary adaptation to various conditions. Wednesday.
Dolphins can serve as a striking example - in their worldview, primary (complex modulation of sounds) and secondary (echolocation) sound information, obviously, is the main channel for its receipt, and taking into account the known data (about the size of their brain, the complexity of its structure, the coefficient of encephalization, the complexity of sound communication, as well as living in the aquatic environment) - people simply do not have the appropriate tools, concepts, reliable algorithms for processing such data, to understand how they "see" the world around them, and, moreover, to objectively judge their intelligence ...
Art
Elephants and other animals painting in the style of abstract expressionism are widely advertised in the press. Compositions of large air bubbles stabilized by the rapid rotation of water for a few minutes, which dolphins create, are considered art.
see also
Literature
- D. McFarland. Animal behavior. Psychobiology, Ethology and Evolution / transl. from English-M.: "World", 1988
- Reznikova Zh. I. "Intelligence of animals: from individual to society"
- Z. A. Zorina, A. A. Smirnova. What did the "talking" monkeys talk about: are higher animals capable of operating with symbols? / scientific. ed. I. I. Poletaeva. - M.: Languages of Slavic Cultures, 2006 .-- 424 p. - ISBN 5-9551-0129-2.
- Roth, Gerhard. The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds. - Dordrecht (The Netherlands) and New York: Springer, 2013 .-- xvii + 320 p. - ISBN 978-94-007-6258-9.
- Sergeev B.F. The stages of the evolution of intelligence. - M.: Nauka, 1986 .-- 192 p.
- Chauvin R. From bee to gorilla. - M.: Mir, 1965 .-- 295 p.
Notes (edit)
- Reznikova Zh.I. Intelligence and language of animals and humans. Fundamentals of Cognitive Ethology. - M.: Akademkniga, 2005.
- Animals: Reflexes, emotions, motives
- Monkeys and birds know how to make guesses
- Do our smaller brothers have intelligence?
- Petrov P.N. Darwin and the meaning of biology (unspecified) ... - Synopsis of the article: Petrov N.P. Memorable dates. Darwin and the meaning of biology // Journal of General Biology. - T. 70. - 2009. - No. 5 (September-October). - S. 356-358. “Evolutionary theory is the foundation of all modern biology. Its appearance brought meaning to the science of life, which before Darwin was only a collection of many facts that could not be agreed upon within the framework of a single theory. " Retrieved April 22, 2010. Archived March 15, 2012.
- Stupina S.B., Filipyechev A.O. Zoopsychology: Lecture notes. - M.: Higher education. - S. 4.- “Traditionally, it is customary to divide the history of zoopsychology into two periods: 1) before the creation of the evolutionary doctrine by Charles Darwin in 1859; 2) the period after Darwin. By the last period, the term "scientific zoopsychology" is often used, emphasizing that before the development of evolutionary doctrine, this science did not have a serious basis and therefore could not be considered independent. "
- Jenkins T. N., Warden C. J., Warner L. H ,. Comparative Psychology: A Comprehensive Treatise. - N. Y .: The Ronald Press Co, 1935. - T. 1. Principles and Methods. - S. 12. Scores of anecdotal collections appeared in which the tendency to humanize and eulogize the mental powers of higher animals reached the ridiculous ... The collections of Romanes, Buchner, Lindsay and Perty are among the most extensive and dependable of those which have survived to our own day.
- Translation of an excerpt from English by contributor Tommy Nord. Quoted from: Romanes G.-J. Animal intelligence. - L.: Kegon Paul, Trench, & Co, 1882 .-- S. 336.
- Pavlov I.P. Reflex of freedom. - Peter. - S. 84.... We completely forbade ourselves (even a fine was announced in the laboratory) to use such psychological expressions as the dog guessed, wanted, wished, etc. Finally, all the phenomena we were interested in began to appear to us in a different form.
- Quoted from Fabri C.E. ISBN 5-89573-051-5.
- Fabri C.E. Fundamentals of Zoopsychology: A textbook for university students. - 3rd. - M.: Russian psychological society, 1999 .-- 464 p. -
The intelligence of an animal is different from that of a human and cannot be measured by conventional IQ tests. In order not to confuse the instinctive behavior of animals with reasonable, it should be understood that instinct is an innate ability, and intelligence is an ability acquired in the course of everyday experience.
For the manifestation of intellectual abilities, an animal needs obstacles on the way to achieving a certain goal. But, if, for example, a dog receives food from its bowl every day during its life, then intellectual abilities in this case will not manifest. In an animal, intellectual actions can arise only in order to invent a new method of action to achieve a goal. Moreover, this method will be individual for each individual animal. There are no universal rules in the animal kingdom.
Although animals have intellectual abilities, they do not play a major role in their life. They trust instincts more, and use intelligence from time to time, and in their life experience it is not fixed and is not inherited.
Examples of intelligent animal behavior
The dog is the very first animal that man has tamed. She is considered the smartest of all the favorites. Once a famous surgeon who lived in the last century found a dog with a damaged limb under his door. He healed the animal and thought that the dog would stay with him as a token of gratitude. But the animal had a different owner, and the first affection turned out to be, and the dog left. But what was the surprise of the surgeon when, some time later, on the threshold of his house, he found the same dog that brought another dog with a broken paw to him in the hope that the doctor would help her too.
And what, no matter how a manifestation of intelligence, can explain the behavior of a pack of dogs, which are slender crossing the road along a pedestrian crossing, while people, endowed with intelligence from birth, run across its place.
Not only dogs, but also other animals show their intelligence. Even ants are capable of solving very complex problems when it is necessary to remember and transmit information about a rich food source to their congeners. But the manifestation of their mental abilities is limited to this. In other circumstances, the intellect is not involved.
It has been observed that swallows give alarm to their chicks at the moment of hatching, when a person is near the nest. The chick stops banging on the shell with its beak until it understands from the voice of its parents that the danger has passed. This example is evidence that intelligence in animals is manifested as a result of life experience. The swallows did not adopt the fear of man from their parents; they learned to fear him in the process of life.
Likewise, rooks avoid a man with a gun, because smell gunpowder. But they could not learn this from their ancestors, because gunpowder was invented later than rooks appeared. Those. their fear is also the result of life experience.
Every owner of a cat, dog, parrot or rat has confirmation that his pet has intelligence. It is clear that animals are not smarter than humans, but they have other qualities that are valuable to humans.
There are two main ways to assess the intelligence of animals. One is to assess behavior, and the other is to study the brain. In the past, both of these approaches were based on the fact that there is a linear sequence in development from lower, nonintelligent animals, differing in relatively simple brains, to higher, intelligent animals, whose brains have a complex structure. Surveying the entire animal kingdom as a whole, we seem to find confirmation of such an impression (see Chapter 11), but when we become more closely acquainted with certain special cases, we find here many obvious deviations. And these are not exceptions to the general rule, but a consequence of the fact that evolution did not proceed linearly, but gave many ramifications, at each of which adaptation to its own complex of external conditions takes place. Thus, animals can be quite complex in some ways and quite simple in others. At the same time, animals of different species can reach the same degree of complexity, being on different branches of the evolutionary tree.
When comparing the brains of animals of different species, it can be expected that there is a certain relationship between the relative size of a particular structure and the degree of complexity of the behavior that is regulated by this structure. The more an animal uses a certain feature of its behavior in the process of adaptation to the environment, the more will be the number of neurons and their interconnections in the corresponding areas of the brain. This is easy to see when comparing specialized brain structures, such as structures associated with different sensory processes. It is much more difficult to understand the case when it is necessary to consider areas of the brain of more general functional purpose, since they can be enlarged due to the fact that different types of animals are subjected to different pressures of selection (Jerison, 1973).
Many traditional ideas about the evolution of the vertebrate brain have been questioned. So, for example, contrary to popular beliefs, it turned out that in the evolutionary series of fish-reptiles-birds-mammals there is no progressive increase in the relative brain size, and in the sequence of lamprey-shark-bony fish-amphibians-reptiles-birds-mammals there is no increase in the relative size forebrain (Jerison, 1973). Indeed, the relative sizes of the forebrain in some sharks and mammals are practically the same (Northcutt, 1981). For a long time, it was believed that the telencephalon of sharks and teleosts was primarily associated with the sense of smell, but now it is believed that the olfactory representation in this region of the brain in non-mammals is no more than in mammals (Hodos, 1982). The idea that lower vertebrates have an undifferentiated forebrain has also been challenged (Hodos, 1982).
Trying to comprehend our understanding of animal intelligence in the light of modern neuroanatomical data, Hodos (1982) comes to the following conclusion:
“If we are faced with the signs of intelligence in representatives of the animal world and correlate them with the degree of development of nervous structures, we must abandon the linear, hierarchically organized, models that prevail in both types of research. We should adopt a more general definition of intelligence than one that is “tied” to a person's needs and values. We must acknowledge the fact that the history of evolution is characterized by divergence and non-linearity, and we cannot expect smooth transitions from one large taxon to another. Finally, we cannot afford to have our knowledge of the mammalian central nervous system create any biases in our search for neural correlates of intelligence in other classes of vertebrates. If we do not change our thinking in this way, we seem to have little hope of moving even a little further into
our attempts to understand the relationship between the human psyche and the psyche of the animal and the corresponding neural substrates ”.
Now let's return to the question of how one can assess the intelligence of an animal by its behavior. Since Binet developed tests to determine the intellectual level of a person in 1905, significant progress has been made in improving and improving them. This progress was primarily due to the fact that it became possible to evaluate various tests, comparing the results of these tests with the subsequent success of the subjects in the learning process. Modern tests to determine the intelligence quotient (IQ) are much more accurate in predicting how far a given person will advance in the field of intellectual achievement. However, many difficulties remain, especially when trying to compare the general intelligence of people of different cultural levels. It turns out to be much more difficult to assess the intelligence of animals, since there is no way to check the validity of a particular test and since animals of different species differ greatly in their capabilities in terms of performing a particular activity.
Until recently, the assessment of the intelligence of animals was mainly based on the study of those abilities that are usually considered an indicator of intelligence in humans. The modern test for determining IQ includes various sections designed to assess a person's memory, his arithmetic and logical capabilities, ability to language and the formation of concepts. As we have seen, pigeons seem to have an amazing ability to form concepts such as water, wood, and man. Should we consider this a sign of great intelligence? Discussing the linguistic abilities of animals, we came to the conclusion that the abilities of humans in this respect are far superior to those of any animal, even a well-trained one.
But what does this mean? The significant superiority of human intelligence, or is it highly specialized in the use of language?
To compare the intellectual abilities of animals of different species, it is difficult to come up with a test that is not biased in one sense or another. Many of the earlier tests for determining an animal's ability to solve problems were unreliable (Warren, 1973). Sometimes the same test carried out on animals of the same species, depending on the type of equipment used, gave completely different results.
Many attempts have been made to find out whether animals can cope with tasks that require learning some general rule of decision-making. Animals can be taught to choose from a group of items on offer that matches the pattern. Primates quickly learn to solve this kind of problem, and pigeons need much more trying to do it. Harry Harlow (Harlow, 1949) developed a test to measure the ability of an animal to follow certain rules and draw correct conclusions. Instead of testing monkeys for their ability to solve one problem of simple visual discrimination (Fig. 27.1, A), Harlow offered them a series of tests in succession, in which to solve a problem they had to follow the same rule. For example, an animal can be offered a number of discrimination problems of the type shown in Fig. 27.1, B. Although different objects were used in each problem, the solution rule was the same: the food reward in each case (within the given problem) is always under the same object, no matter what position it occupies. If, as a sequence of such tasks of the same type is presented, the animal solves them all the better, then in this case they say that he has formed learning setting(learning set).
As can be seen from Fig. 27.1, when examining the ability of animals to learn
Rice. 27.1. A series of discrimination problems that were used to investigate the learning attitude. A. Simple discrimination (the arrow shows the correct choice: the object under which there is food). B. Inverse problem (the animal's solution must be the opposite of the one that was correct in the previous problem). V. Conditional task (you need to select one item if both items are gray, and another if both are white). G. Matching problem (the animal must choose an item that matches the pattern on the left side of the tray). D. The problem of dissimilarity (you need to choose the subject that is different from the other two). (After Passingham, 1981.)
different types of problems can be used because the general rule for solving is the same for a whole set of problems, and that one principle must be followed to obtain the correct solution. Critics of this technique have observed that the ability of animals of different species to form a learning attitude is highly dependent on how the tests are conducted (Hodos, 1970). However, even taking into account the opinions of these critics, it seems that it should be recognized that animals of different species do differ in their ability to form a learning attitude (Passingham, 1981). When different species of animals were ranked according to the rate of improvement in their responses when consistently presenting the same type of tasks, then their rank could be guessed based on the index of brain development
(Ridell, 1979; Passingham, 1982). This index estimates the number of nerve cells in the brain that are excessive in relation to those required for the regulation of somatic functions (Jerison, 1973). Thus, it seems that tests, similar to tests for determining the intelligence of humans, can be developed to assess the intelligence of animals, and these tests allow you to distinguish the mental abilities of animals of different species.
The belief that such tests represent a true measure of intelligence is supported by evidence that the performance of these tests is correlated with a measure of brain size. Similar results were obtained using tests of a different type, shown in Fig. 27.1. For example, it has been shown that rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees
Rice. 27.2. Formation of the installation of learning visual discrimination in mammals. The percentage of correct answers in the second sample when solving each problem as a function of the number of proposed problems. (After Passingham, 1981.)
unlike cats, they improve their performance much faster when solving a series of problems to distinguish objects, if they had previous experience in solving reversible tasks, that is, tasks in which a change in the reinforced choice of the subject was periodically made (Warren, 1974). These two types of problems are solved on the basis of general principles that macaques and chimpanzees are able to use, whereas cats lack this ability. Similar differences between cats and monkeys can be noted in the case of experiments with solving problems on dissimilarity, in which the animal must choose an unpaired from a group of objects (Warren, 1965). Critics of these experiments argue that they are inevitably carried out in such a way that it is easy for animals of one species, but difficult for animals of another species (Macphail, 1982). But even if these differences are taken seriously, they reflect only one aspect of intellectual activity, and it is not surprising that macaques and higher apes perform well on tests designed to determine the IQ of a person, since they are all related to primates.
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