71–80 of 165 posts
The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…
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Having a concept of "none of a thing" is one thing. Abstracting that to a number is a different thing. Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have," and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one with a negation (not), instead of a number.
What if they're thinking "zero" but just don't have the word for it. I.e. what if this is just a linguistic deficit? Please err on the side of me understanding your question well.
The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…
I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour. Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.
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crows do team work to figure out machines monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition) beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.
I have been training the crows in my neighbourhood to solve puzzles. They visit me every day now. One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm super curious! Thanks!
There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.…
I have always assumed one of our cats could count. Our cats got the desert plates at the end of our meal. One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there were none left. But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table, always seemed to know when he had them all.
If I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).
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> The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. It goes both ways, in the past we had Clever Hans[1]. People believed Hans could perform simple math, when his cleverness was actually watching his owners expression for small changes. So any observed intelligence ends up under suspicion of them acting on information gained from a much simpler side channel. [1] https://simpl…
The thing about animal intelligence is that it is probably significantly different from ours. In studying it, we must avoid antromorphization of animals. Mammals are somewhat close to us, but we have diverged from birds over a hundred million years ago and we still struggle to understand how a tiny and smooth brain such as corvids have can produce such an observably intelligent behavior.
Corvids may have small brains in terms of volume, but not measured by the number of neurons in the areas that count[1].
Maybe animal intelligence is not so different to ours, but our measure is.
The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…
This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way: "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?" https://youtu.be/cbSu2PXOTOc
> The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex.
(I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.)
There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.…
There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he actually did it is brilliant. When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this…
Children will make similar classification errors when learning too.
None of this means that it’s not possible they can also learn counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about experimental design. The book goes into that.