Human intelligence - is it really all that?
11 Mar 2009 by Evoluted New Media
Most people would agree that intelligence is the great divide between humans and other animals - but one scientist thinks it may not be as great a gap as you suspect.
Most people would agree that intelligence is the great divide between humans and other animals - but one scientist thinks it may not be as great a gap as you suspect.
According to American psychologist Ed Wasserman- who recently presented his findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago - baboons and pigeons can perform a cognitive task known as the ‘backbone’ of our thinking.
Wasserman said: "Why we would believe that humans alone have such capabilities is a peculiar and unfortunate arrogance. That's one reason why I enjoy studying animals; the smarter we discover them to be, the more humble we should be.”
If you have two pennies in your left hand and a 50 pence piece and a 10 penny piece in your right hand, then you can correctly report that the two coins in your left hand are the same and that the two coins in your right hand are different. Wasserman's research shows that baboons and pigeons can do that, too. The study found that both pigeons and people can learn same-different discriminations with visual stimuli that never repeat from trial to trial, thus proving that simple memory cannot explain this cognitive feat.
Wasserman and his associates discovered that both baboons and pigeons also understand the relations between relations - something that only humans were believed to appreciate. For example, the relation between A and A and the relation between B and B is the same: same equals same.
“The newsworthiness of our baboon experiment was to show that nonhuman primates are capable of higher-order relational learning. Understanding the relation between relations was previously believed to be a kind of cognition that sets humans apart from all other animals," Wasserman said. "The follow-up discovery - that pigeons too are capable of such higher-order relational learning - affirmed our suspicion that we've really established a finding of broad evolutionary significance."
In addition to keeping human egos in check by proving we're not the only smart creatures on earth, this research may have practical applications. Some of the methods he uses to study baboons and pigeons can be deployed to study human cognition said Wasserman.
