Animal intelligence

The scientific community, as well as everyday people have long been intrigued by questions about how animals think. Studies of animal cognition increased dramatically in the last half of the twentieth century. Chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast have demonstrated extensive use of rocks as tools in cracking nuts. These primates also hide undesirable expressions from their faces and act as if blind or deaf. Vervets have been found to use an elaborate system of alarm calls that seem to function as words. Parrots can demonstrate the ability to count, and birds exhibit the capacity to make tools to gather food. Dolphins can follow simple commands. Primates have been trained to use signs for symbolic purposes and to communicate needs, desires, and thoughts.

Theories of Cognitive Ethology

Cognitive ethology is a relatively new discipline that studies animal intelligence. Donald Griffin is considered to have founded this branch of study through the publication of Animal Thinking (1984) and Animal Minds (1992). Since the appearance of his books, numerous instances of animal intelligence have been gathered from observation and experimentation.

Traditionally, attitudes about animal intelligence can be sorted into those that place animals on a continuum with humans and those that see animals as distinct from humans. From the former perspective, animal behavior is readily interpreted as a definite sign of various cognitive skills and special abilities along a continuum of development. From a discontinuity perspective, humans alone are considered to possess the higher cognitive skill of reasoning. The higher cognitive abilities are considered to be a uniquely human capacity that sets them apart from the lower animals, who are controlled by instinct.

Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), defended the idea of the intelligence of animals existing on a continuum with humans. Since animals and humans have a common ancestry, animals would have the fundamental capacities for rational choice, reflection, and insight. Darwin concluded that the differences between the minds of humans and animals were of degree rather than of kind. Following Darwin’s proclamation, a number of anecdotal studies concerning animal intelligence appeared that suggested extensive cognitive ability in animals. Unfortunately, many of the examples illustrated anthropomorphism. This is the process whereby humanlike characteristics are attributed to animal behavior.

Some interpretations of Darwin’s statement created a distorted view about animal evolution that persisted long into the twentieth century. The idea that life on earth represents a chain of progress from inferior to superior forms began to influence the view of animal intelligence. The theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny also became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. This theory, which does not have any scientific support, suggested that the advancement of life forms corresponded to the stages of development for humans. This stepladder approach to animal intelligence led to a ranking of animals compared to the developmental stages of human infants and children.

This approach to animal intelligence is flawed because it relies on the notion that some animals are more highly evolved than others are. Evolution does not have a single point of greatest evolution. The branches of the evolutionary tree have culminated with many different species occupying special niches. Thus, the “degree” of a species’ evolution depends on the extent to which it successfully occupies its niche.

Animals Who Might Think

In addition to a tendency to attribute states of mind to animals that are found in humans, there were a number of cases of attiburing trained behavior in animals as signs of reasoning skills. One of the most famous examples in the early 1900s was the case of a horse named Clever Hans. Its owner, Wilhelm von Osten, suggested that Clever Hans possessed arithmetic skills. When von Osten presented a written arithmetic problem to Hans, the horse would tap out the answer with his forefoot. Clever Hans also appeared adept at telling time and answered questions about sociopolitical events by nodding or shaking his head yes or no. The horse’s abilities suggested the similarity between animal and human minds to many individuals. Eventually, the Prussian Academy of Sciences discovered that Hans was not answering the questions by means of any reasoning skills but was an astute observer of the behavior of his owner and those around him. When questions were posed to Hans, cues were provided unconsciously to the horse about the correct answer. Since horses have evolved to ascertain subtle visual cues from others in their herd, Hans was able to form cued associations which led to a reward. von Osten was not attempting to perpetrate fraud but instead believed the possibility that a horse could have reasoning ability. von Osten nonetheless, was not sophisticated in how he tested for the skills.

The case of Clever Hans illustrates two other problems that complicate efforts to measure levels of intelligence in animals. First is the problem of anthropomorphism. People develop an emotional bond with animals and interpret behavior to enhance the closeness they feel to them. The second problem concerns the methods used to measure intelligence. The classic case of Köhler’s chimpanzees illustrates this problem.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Köhler sought to quantify the reasoning ability of chimpanzees to obtain food outside of an enclosure. After a rake was left in the enclosure, food was placed out of reach of the caged chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were able to use the rake to bring food to the cage. Köhler concluded that the animals had insight into the nature of the problem and used reasoning to achieve a solution. A further study, requiring the fitting together of two sticks in order to reach the food. This also supported Köhler’s conclusions. Later experimentation revealed that chimpanzees without a history of playing with sticks could not solve the problem. Chimpanzees required previously-obtained knowledge on how sticks could be employed. In solving the problem, they were using an instinctual tendency to play with sticks and scrape them over the ground.

Primates and Sign Language

A contemporary example of the problem of measurement can be provided with the case of Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught sign language. Because of physical inability to vocalize human speech, chimpanzees were taught sign language as a mode of communication with humans. Soon Washoe and another signing chimpanzee, Nim Chimsky, were reported to have spontaneously created novel sentences through their signing. For example, Washoe was reported to have signed the combination "water" and "bird" after seeing a swan. Being a novel combination of signs, the trainers of Washoe explained the behavior as creative insight. Unfortunately, Washoe had also shown repeated signing of meaningless combinations, leading to the conclusion that a significant pairing of signs would eventually appear not because of the primate’s cognitive reasoning but as a result of chance. Inevitably, these early attempts to demonstrate animal intelligence were widely discredited as exaggeration or self-delusion on the part of the animal’s trainers, and this animal language research from the late 1970’s fell into disrepute.

In order avoid the ambiguities of sign language, later researchers used keyboards that related symbols to a variety of objects, people, and places. Much of this research has taken place at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta under the guidance of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. In the first experiments, two chimpanzees, Austin and Sherman, were familiarized with a system of symbols or lexigrams. Each was abstract and arbitrarily associated with an object, person, place, or situation. Eventually Austin and Sherman learned to communicate with symbols illustrated on a keyboard. For example, an experiment was devised where one chimpanzee was shown where food was being deposited in a certain container while the other had control of a tool to open the container. With the keyboard present, the chimpanzees were able to communicate with one another to use the tool on the correct container.

Afterwards, a bonobo became the star pupil of this technique and learned a vocabulary of two hundred symbols. Kanzi eventually showed the capacity to construct rudimentary sentences that were generated spontaneously. The bonobos and chimpanzees trained using the keyboards appear to be exhibiting a protogrammar. This is a term to indicate the beginnings of grammar, roughly equivalent to the verbal skills seen in a human child about two to three years old.

In the late 1990s, two other chimpanzees, Panbanisha and Panzee, surpassed the capacities of Kanzi. Panbanisha was reported to understand complex sentences and use the keyboard to communicate spontaneously with the outside world. Panzee reportedly demonstrated lasting recall of hidden objects and could communicate that knowledge to blinded confederates.

In the early twentieth century, the center investigated cooperation, delayed gratification, metacognition (that is, consciousness of one's thinking), numeracy, planning and recall, and responses to inequity, among various primate species, including capuchin and rhesus monkeys. Researchers have concluded that apes, like humans, learn better from observation than direct instruction and gain new competencies without reinforcement, an area of behavior that researcher Michael Beran termed "emergent" learning. Also, remarkably, researcher Sarah Brosnan and her colleagues found that capuchins object when they observe others receiving better treatment, suggesting an evolutionary basis for ethics and morals.

Although the results have been impressive, critics of the center’s activities remain. The question remains whether the animals are demonstrating extremely effective training, reacting to subtle cuing, or exhibiting some level of abstract reasoning. Other perennial issues are the need to define what exactly constitutes human language and whether linguistic performance or comprehension should be the prime indicator of cognition.

In the 2020s, an idea gaining increasing circulation is that animals exhibit forms of cognitive abilities that are different than what humans would ascribe as intelligence in themselves. What humans perceive or value as intelligence are only those abilities that contribute to their own activities or experiences. As animals are concerned with different activities and priorities, their “intelligence” may manifest in different forms altogether. One example is squirrels that hide thousands of caches of nuts to sustain themselves during winter. The intelligence of squirrels is such that they can remember large numbers of precise locations to retrieve their caches and hence survive. This form of memory is likely beyond the capacity of human intelligence to do similarly. Other examples are organisms such as butterflies, whales, salmon, and birds that are born in very specific spots on the earth. As adults, these organisms may travel to other global locations, which may be continents away. They, however, retain the ability to navigate thousands of miles to the same specific spots to spawn their next generation of offspring. Again, humans would be challenged to mimic these same types of intelligence.

Principal Terms

anthropomorphism: attributing human characteristics or states of mind to animals

cognition: transformation and elaboration of sensory input

cognitive ethology: scientific study of animal intelligence

lexigrams: symbols associated with objects or places in keyboard communication experiments with primates

protogrammar: word coined to signify the early foundation for grammar development found in primates

recapitulation: stages of human development reappearing in different animal species

Bibliography

Budiansky, Stephen. If a Lion Could Talk. New York: Free Press, 1998. A good collection of contemporary and historical cases of animal intelligence. The stories cover a wide range of examples seen in various animal species.

Feehly, Conor. "How Intelligence Is Measured In The Animal Kingdom." Discover, 17 Jan. 2023, www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-intelligence-is-measured-in-the-animal-kingdom. Accessed 13 July 2023.

"History." Language Research Center, Georgia State University, 11 Aug. 2011, www2.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/3476.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2018.

Johnson, George. "Chimp Talk Debate: Is It Really Language?" The New York Times, 6 June 1995, www.nytimes.com/1995/06/06/science/chimp-talk-debate-is-it-really-language.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2018.

Moss, Cynthia. Elephant Memories. New York: William Morrow, 1988. An interesting account of thirteen years of field observations concerning the behavior of elephants in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

Page, George. Inside the Animal Mind. New York: Doubleday, 1999. The author begins with a historical account of the popular and scientific views about animal intelligence. He provides good details about the various attempts to communicate with primates by teaching them sign language or through the use of keyboards.

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue. Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994. This book presents an apparent breakthrough in the communication with chimpanzees using symbols and a keyboard. It includes a number of incidences of the spontaneous construction of sentences by the primates.

Samuel, Sigal. "Why Do We Care How Smart Animals Are?" Vox, 22 Apr. 2021, www.vox.com/the-highlight/22373580/animals-intelligent-smart-orcas-chickens. Accessed 13 July 2023.

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, Stuart G. Shanker, and Talbot J. Taylor. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A book written from an academic and scientific perspective about the ability of chimpanzees to communicate by means of symbols and a keyboard display.

Walsh, Owen. "Who Are the Smartest Animals on Earth?" The Human League, 17 Oct. 2022, thehumaneleague.org/article/animal-intelligence. Accessed 13 July 2023.