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Animal Intelligence

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Mighty_Emperor

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It's time you primates quit making a monkey out of me

February 21, 2004



Science may have been unduly kind to the apes. Deborah Smith reports on the new-found respect for the brain power of other animals.

So you think that apes are at the top of the tree when it comes to intelligence - apart from us, of course? Think again, is the advice of two of Australia's leading primate experts.

New research shows elephants, dogs, birds, fish and other animals have mental abilities, such as tool use or hunting skills, that surpass those of our closest hairy relatives, say Professors Lesley Rogers and Gisela Kaplan of the University of New England.

Even the much maligned chicken we enjoy for dinner is no dummy, they say. It turns out to be a whizz at abstract concepts like finding the centre of different geometric shapes.

Professors Rogers and Kaplan, who work with orang-utans and marmosets, are well aware that close contact with non-human primates can have a profound effect on people. A young orang-utan that Professor Kaplan studied in Borneo adopted her as mother. "The intensity of that relationship was overwhelming," she recalls.

This has made them question how much the emotional bonds between scientists and their subjects has coloured past research in the apes favour.

While they believe it was a political necessity that the special qualities of apes were emphasised during the 1960s and 1970s to bring about their protection, it's time for some healthy scepticism about their supposed superiority and unique capabilities.

"We're not arguing primates shouldn't be given special treatment," says Professor Rogers. "But we are . . . aware of the risks of choosing to work on one species instead of choosing a problem and then testing it on a range of species."

As a start, the professors have drawn together the latest evidence from world experts in a new scientific book they have edited, Comparative Vertebrate Cognition. Are Primates Superior to Non-Primates? (Kluwer Academic).

It is full of surprises. Fish may not be geniuses. But guppies, it turns out, can learn quickly, by following the ones that know the route to food in a maze. If the research had been on primates it would probably have been interpreted as really clever behaviour, Professor Rogers notes.

Elephants not only have excellent memories, they are like chimps in realising that some humans know more than others.

In experiments where people point out where a treat is hidden, the elephants are quick to twig, like primates, that a person who watched the treat being secreted away is a more reliable guide than someone, say, with a bucket on their head, who saw nothing.

Chimps are also renowned for following the gaze of humans, in the same way that we all tend to look up at the sky when someone else does. This is regarded as a sign of higher cognition, because the animal realises the human is thinking about something different to them, says Professor Rogers. "But domestic dogs are even better at it than chimps."

Dogs may also be better hunters than chimps, says Professor Kaplan. Wild dogs can set up ambushes, with one revealing itself to the prey so it will move in the direction of two hidden members of the pack. "Only in chimpanzees has it been interpreted as a mark of higher intelligence," says Professor Kaplan.

Although the brains of birds are relatively small, it is now known they can grow large numbers of new nerve cells when needed, for example, during singing season.

Crows in New Caledonia have been found not only to cut different kinds of tools from leaves to probe for insects in tree trunks, but they also store them for future use. "This definitely rivals tool use in chimps," says Professor Rogers.

The crows are also the only other species apart from humans to display left or right "handedness" in their manipulatory techniques, New Zealand researchers led by Dr Gavin Hunt have discovered.

In Japan, carrion crows cleverly wait until the traffic lights change, then dash out and place their walnuts on the road for cars to crack open.

Professor Kaplan studies Australian magpies and has identified at least 12 different alarm calls. Future research is aimed at determining whether, as she suspects, magpies are communicating at the level of saying, "Watch out, here comes an eagle", or "Watch out, here comes a ground predator".

Professor Rogers says Italian researchers have shown chickens taught to find food in the middle of a square area can then locate the middle of any space such as a circle or triangle.

They can also recognise a shape when it has been split into two halves, say, by a black bar. When children can do this it is hailed as a milestone of cognitive development, she says. "But chicks can do it from the word go."

Their dumb reputation is undeserved. "It's a political issue. The animals we eat most are the ones we tend to devalue most," she says.

The book does not answer whether apes are intellectually superior, the editors write. "Researchers are only at the beginning of the search. It is important, however, to continue asking this question."
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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/20/1077072840069.html

Book details:

Comparative Vertebrate Cognition
Are Primates Superior to Non-Primates

edited by

Lesley J. Rogers
Centre for Neuroscience & Animal Behavior, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia

Gisela Kaplan
Centre for Neuroscience & Animal Behavior, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia


Book Series: DEVELOPMENTS IN PRIMATOLOGY: PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS : Volume 003


This book explores afresh the long-standing interest, and emphasis on, the `special' capacities of primates. Some of the recent discoveries of the higher cognitive abilities of other mammals and also birds challenge the concept that primates are special and even the view that the cognitive ability of apes is more advanced than that of nonprimate mammals and birds. It is therefore timely to ask whether primates are, in fact, special and to do so from a broad range of perspectives. Divided into five sections this book deals with topics about higher cognition and how it is manifested in different species, and also considers aspects of brain structure that might be associated with complex behavior.

It will become apparent to the reader that researchers are only at the beginning of the search to find out whether primates are special and, of course, by `special' is meant not just different, which applies to all biological categories, but `better' in the ephemeral sense of being more like us and being cognitively superior to all other species.

This volume, voicing the opinions of some leading primatologists, ethologists, psychobiologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists, is not speaking from the standpoint of a political engagement with primates but of a scientific engagement with primates in relation to all other species.


Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
Hardbound, ISBN 0-306-47727-0
December 2003, 386 pp.
EUR 126.00 / USD 140.00 / GBP 87.00
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http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/0-306-47727-0

Sounds very interesting - order it for your local library now.

Emps
 
Elephants turn to seismic communication

8 June 2004

It is well known that elephants "speak" to each other but they might also communicate through seismic waves according to geophysicists. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, Roland Günther and Simon Klemperer at Stanford University have shown that elephants can produce low-frequency waves that are capable of travelling more than two kilometres through the ground (Geophysical Research Letters 31 L11602). Seismic communication is used by a variety of animals including arthropods, amphibians and small rodents.


Elephants communicate primarily through sounds or vocalisations known as "rumbles". These rumbles have fundamental frequencies in the infrasonic range below 30 Hertz, which means that they cannot be heard by humans, although the harmonics of the fundamental frequency are audible. The Stanford team has shown that these rumbles can also act as a source of Rayleigh waves that can travel through the ground.

Following on from previous work by O'Connell-Rodwell, the Stanford geophysicists studied the propagation of Rayleigh waves produced by three trained African elephants using a line of 57 geophones that began just outside the elephant enclosure and extended out to about 175 metres. They also used three microphones to measure acoustic signals in the air. Using computer models, the scientists estimated that the seismic signals produced by the elephants could travel distances up to about 2.2 kilometres through the ground, compared with only 1-2 kilometres for through the air.

"It is possible that elephants use ground waves to communicate during times when acoustic communication is not ideal, as well as over short distances to supplement acoustic communication," Günther told PhysicsWeb.

O'Connell-Rodwell and colleagues believe that elephants sense the underground vibrations through special receptors in their feet and trunks. The team is now studying elephants at Oakland Zoo in California and in the Etosha National Park in Namibia.
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http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/6/4
 
Brainy Border Collie Knows 200 Words


By Kate Ruder

Posted: June 10, 2004



A border collie from Germany named Rico has proven what many pet owners intuitively know—dogs can be exceptionally smart.

Rico has a vocabulary of more than 200 words, and has demonstrated that he can learn the names of new toys easily, and remember the names weeks later.

These findings from a new study suggest that some basics of language and learning may be innate to dogs and other animals, and may have evolved independent of humans. Julia Fischer of Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led the study, published online today in Science.

The collie’s vocabulary is on par with other trained animals like apes, dolphins, sea lions, and parrots. He correctly retrieved 37 of 40 randomly chosen toys from his collection of 200 toys. Rico can fetch toys that have either German names, such as Zitrone (lemon) and Kaninchen (bunny), or English names, such as Big Mac, Seahorse, and Mr. Green.

Most impressive is Rico’s deftness in learning the names of new toys. When the researchers placed a new toy among his familiar toys and asked him to retrieve it using a word he’d never heard before, Rico usually retrieved the new toy. Later, after not seeing the new toy for a month, he successfully retrieved it half the time.

“Four weeks later, he had actually integrated the word into his vocabulary without instruction,” says Fischer.

Toddlers learn words in a similar way—a technique that scientists call “fast mapping.”

It’s not Rico’s first time in the spotlight. Rico appeared on the popular European game show “Wetten das?” and successfully fetched various toys from his collection to the delight of television audiences.

Among the millions of viewers who saw Rico on television that night was Fischer, and she later asked permission to test Rico.

Fischer was skeptical that the owners might be unconsciously giving Rico subtle cues to retrieve the correct item, a phenomenon known as the “Clever Hans” effect.

Clever Hans was a horse famous in the early 1900s for doing calculus by tapping answers to equations with his hoof. Later, the psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Clever Hans’ owner did the math and then gave the horse a raised eyebrow, or nod, to stop when he reached the correct number of taps.

To control the experiments for Rico, Fischer had the dog and his owner sit in a separate room while she arranged random toys on the floor. Then she would join dog and owner and have the owner tell Rico to fetch specific items in the next room. It worked!

Rico is part genius dog and part extremely motivated pet, says Fischer, adding that the findings probably do not apply to the average dog.

Border collies are famous for their smarts. Traditionally used as herding dogs, collies need plenty of intellectual activity and exercise. Rico’s owners started training him to learn the names of toys when he was sick at 10-months old and could not leave the house. He is now a healthy 9-year-old.

Do genes play a role in Rico’s talents?

“We just don’t know,” says Fischer. “But if you think his abilities have something to do with the breed, then there is probably some kind of underlying genetics.”
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http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/06/10/smartdog.php
 
I knew it. For dogs at least.

My two dogs used to play a game with me. One would distract me, while the other would steal my shoes and take them outside. You can't tell me that didn't happen without cooperation, planning, etc...not to mention a sense of mischief!

I've always thought that animals were more intelligent that us humans gave them credit for. We just like to think we're so superior.

EDIT: Just for the record. One of my dogs is a border collie, the other is a blue heeler (Australian cattle dog).
 
Who let the dogs out?

Who let the dogs out? It was Red the lurcher

With the light fading fast, a lone figure slides back the steel bolt, tugs open the cell-like door and slips out.

Glancing about to avoid the diminished night-time security, he moves quickly towards his destination: the kitchen.

But as anyone who has ever had an illicit midnight feast will know, they are not half as much fun without pals.

Red the lurcher astonished staff at Battersea Dogs' Home in south London by learning not only to unbolt his kennel door, but then to liberate his favourite canine companions to join the fun.

Staff at the animal shelter were baffled when for several mornings in a row they arrived for work to find several dogs had escaped and wreaked havoc in the kitchens.

Determined to find the culprit, managers installed video surveillance on Thursday night.

They saw four-year-old Red reaching up on his hind paws and using his nose and teeth to undo the bolt securing the door to his caged accommodation.

Even more astonishing was the sight of him then moving swiftly from kennel to kennel performing the same trick to free other dogs.

Becky Blackmore, of Battersea Dogs' Home, said: "We had come in to chaos in the morning. It happened probably about a dozen times. We would come in to lots of dogs out on their block.

"They had had lots of food, lots of fun and games and caused loads of mess. We weren't too sure what was going on. There are lots of stories about Battersea being haunted so we wanted to make sure that there was an explanation for what was going on and we managed to catch the culprit.

"It is amazing really because lurchers aren't particularly renowned for their intelligence."

Staff believed that Red's emaciated state when he was rescued as a stray in June could explain his determination to track down food. They are hoping his new-found fame will help to secure him a new home.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/05/ndogs05.xml
 
I saw some footage of this on the news.

The most amazing bit, as the article says, is when Red goes and lets the other dogs out as well. It was really funny to see the other dogs jumping up and wagging their tails as Red came to let them out.

But seriously, why would he do that if animals went on instinct alone? In other words, I don't believe that they do.
 
Meet Beau: The maths genius dog who can add, subtract and do square roots... as long as he gets a biscuit in return
By Lee Moran
Last updated at 9:29 AM on 17th August 2011

You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks - but what about basic maths to a 12-year-old Labrador?
Beau the canine calculator is quickly becoming something of a celebrity in Montana where he can be seen showing off his counting skills in shops, restaurants and cabins.
The prodigal pooch can add, subtract and do square roots - with his owners claiming an incredible 85 per cent accuracy rate - just as long as he's fed a treat for his endeavours.

'I've had dogs all my life, but this dog is different. He's super smart,' said proud owner David Madsen, who has also taught his mastermind mutt how to count in Spanish.
Beau began learning maths after David laid out a handful of dog biscuits and rewarded him when his number of barks corresponded to the number of treats.

After catching on, his training was upped, until he was counting to ten. Now he can answer questions about golf and football scores, and read simple sums from pieces of paper. :shock:
And to tell he has finished answering a question, Beau always shoots his ears into an upright and locked position after the final bark.

But his skill comes at a price. David added: 'If I don't have treats, he gets tired of it after two or three questions. He doesn't work for free.'
Cynics would say David is secretly signalling to his mongrel about how many times to bark, or when to stop. But he still manages to perform his trick after his owner has left the room.

David's son Matt said: 'My dad had a buddy in Atlanta who was determined to prove we were signaling him somehow.
'He took Beau out on the back deck by himself and drilled him one-on-one for 30 minutes, and when they came back in, all the guy said was, ‘You know what? That dog's a genius.'

David, a retired AT&T executive who is married to Patti, adopted Beau as a puppy from his daughter Melissa when she was a student at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia.
Melissa found the three-month-old hound on her doorstep and took him in.
After advertising around the campus that she had found a lost dog, the owner called saying he wanted him back.
But Melissa had fallen in love with Beau, and so her boyfriend at the time Brad Canady, who is now her husband, bought him back for several hundred dollars.
Because she lived in a flat share where pets were not allowed, her parents took him in.

Melissa now has joint custody of Beau with her parents - with the dog spending the summer months with David and Patti when they are at their Flathead Lake home, and in Georgia with her for the rest of the year.

Beau had a brush with stardom in the early noughties when he auditioned for the Stupid Pet Tricks segment on CBS's The Late Show With David Letterman.
But, although the producers loved him, he did not make the final cut for the New York show, and so had to be content with appearing on a local television station - from where he soon became the talk of the town.

Chris Ricciardi, chief of the Finley Point-Yellow Bay, Montana Fire Department, vouched for Beau's skills.
He said: 'Dave will say, 'What's two and three?' Then the dog will go, 'Bark, bark ... bark, bark, bark,' This dog is amazing.' :D

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1VIArZ3CZ
 
Some of this country's kids can't even do that when they leave school.
They should take lessons from the dog!
 
Experiments demonstrate monkeys exhibit more cognitive flexibility than humans in playing structured "games" ...

An alternate interpretation is that monkeys are more eager to cheat and / or minimize effort, but I'm not sure this version necessarily reflects any better on the humans.

Game Over: These Monkeys Just Crushed Humans on a Computer Game

When it comes to winning games and solving puzzles, sometimes monkeys play smarter than humans.

Monkeys may show off their physical flexibility as they clamber over tangled tree branches, but the animals also display impressive "cognitive flexibility," or the ability to quickly change how they think about, and work to solve, a problem. Whereas monkeys can think on their feet, humans often become set in their ways and cling to inefficient strategies for problem solving, according to new research.

"We are a unique species and have various ways in which we are exceptionally different from every other creature on the planet. But we're also sometimes really dumb," study co-author Julia Watzek, a graduate student in psychology at Georgia State University, said in a statement. For the research, published Sept. 13 in the journal Scientific Reports, Watzek and her colleagues pitted capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys against undergraduate students in a game of wits — in other words, a simple computer game. ...

In the game, four squares appeared on screen during each trial: one striped, one spotted and two blank. In training sessions, players learned that clicking the striped square and then the spotted square would cause a blue triangle to pop up in place of one of the blank squares. Clicking the blue triangle produced a reward — in this case, an auditory whoop for humans to indicate that they had solved the puzzle, and a banana pellet for monkeys.

"They kind of like playing computer games and getting banana pellets," Watzek told Live Science. The primates voluntarily enter the testing compartment during the study and interact with the computer using a modified video game controller. ...

Partway through the game, the researchers introduced a shortcut: a quick-and-dirty cheat to win the game without following the established rules.

Suddenly, the blue triangle began to appear at the start of gameplay, alongside the striped and spotted squares. If a player clicked on the blue triangle immediately, they received their reward right away. This shortcut appeared in half of the subsequent trials. About 70% of the monkeys took advantage of the shortcut the very first time it appeared, and more than 20% used the strategy whenever possible.

In comparison, only one human out of 56 took the shortcut when it first appeared, and none used the strategy in every trial they could. Instead, they stuck to what they knew, clicking the striped and spotted squares in succession before daring to prod the blue triangle.

"I am really surprised that the humans, a sizable portion … just keep using the same strategy," Watzek told Live Science. In a related experiment, the same human participants were shown a video of someone else employing the shortcut and were explicitly told not to "be afraid to try something new." Even when granted creative license, about 30% of participants wouldn't budge from their learned technique. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/monkeys-outsmart-humans.html
 
Curtain twitching judgemental gossips.

Like a nosy neighbor, marmosets eavesdrop on the conversations of others—and judge them based on what they “say,” new research finds. The pint-size primates might be using the behavior to screen strangers, preferring to mingle with those they feel will make the best nannies for their offspring.

“This study is really cool because it pinpoints what’s happening inside the animal” when they eavesdrop, says Sonja Koski, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Helsinki who was not involved with the work.

Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are native to the forests of northeastern Brazil, where they scurry between branches like squirrels, thanks to their clawed fingernails. They’re tiny, weighing about 250 grams, and have white ear tufts that evoke the untamed hair of Albert Einstein. But it’s their social structure that really sets them apart. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...op-their-neighbors-and-judge-them-accordingly
 
The Patterdale has never been trained to voice commands, except Wait and her name. When she was small she was very resistent to teaching, (well, terrier) and doesn't like food treats, so I just never really bothered much with intensive training. She does what I want her to do because she hates me being cross and just wants to please me.

Yet even she, the demon hound with no particular claim to vast intelligence, just a low innate cunning and a desire to chase anything that moves, has a vocabulary of understood words which is surprisingly high. I put it down to repetition. So when we are walking and she's about to go around a parked car the wrong way, I always say 'no, this side.' So now all I have to say is 'this side' and she comes around obstacles towards me.

People underestimate even the most horrible of dogs' ability to recognise patterns.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Banjo duels before you know it!
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images (9).jpeg
 
Souleater said:
Bonobo chimp makes a fire and toasts marshmallows
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Waitaminnit, waitaminnit . . .

Has this thing been verified as real? It's just a little TOO good, if you know what I mean . . .

If it's truly authentic, it's amazing, but it's setting off my skepticism alarms all over the place . . .
 
If you haven't seen it i highly recommend this facinating and wonderful documentary of the bizarre and beautiful octopus that was shown on BBC2 in 2019

 
I posted this experience in another thread:

There's a pair of crows that I feed regularly outside my work (when I go out there for a smoke/vape). I saw one once notice a dead wasp in the grass. The bird examined it closely, picked it up (carefully) by a wing, put it down again and then stepped on it. It exerted just enough pressure to make the insect's sting protrude and then pecked down incredibly fast and whipped the sting (and attached internal organs) out of the wasp's abdomen. The crow then fastidiously wiped it's beak on the grass before swallowing the wasp with seemingly great satisfaction.

They're scarily smart.
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I still don't know how the bird knew how to do that. Had it seen one of it's parents do it when it was young? Or had it worked it out for itself through trial and (painful) error? Either, to my mind, is quite remarkable.
 
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