Intelligence

Intelligence

• How is intelligence distributed and what is it?
• Can we justify artificial ranks?
• Evolution?
• Brain size?
• Can we rank intelligence by speed of learning?
• Perceptual demands - Bitterman (1975)
• Biological relevance - Garcia & Koelling (1966)
• Intelligence as Information Processing.
• 2. Animal Memory:
• Capacity.
• Food-storing birds - Vander Wall (1982).
• Vaughan & Greene (1984) - pigeons - photographs.
• Time.
• Periodic timing.
• Interval timing -Church & Deluty (1977), Church & Gibbon (1982).
• Number.
• Rats - Meck & Church (1983).
• Monkeys - Brannon & Terrace (2000).
• 5-day old chicks - Regani, Regotin & Vallortigara (2007).

Banks and Flora (1977)

• Ranked animal intelligence.
• Fish 1.68
• Chickens 3.36
• Sheep 3.37
• Cows 3.58
• Horses 5.57
• Cats 6.6
• Dogs 7.36
• Apes 9.2
• Humans 10
• Asked participants to rank animal intelligence.
• The reasons for these rankings come down to our experience of these animals, no particular scientific reasons other than their appearance or the way in which we interact with them.

Justifications for rankings - Aristotle

• He was a Greek Philosopher.
• He thought about the intelligence in animals in term software a proto-evolutionary theory.
• Animals being in the lowest orders and complex animals being in the highest orders, in what he called the great chain of being.
• This idea of a natural order of complexity, based around a complexity of animals has been prevalent through history, all the way through to medieval.
• Medievalists have included plant life, trees, then animals then through to humans. They also included angel and God at the top and hell at the bottom. So they have included the supernatural world as well.

Justification for rankings - Romanes

• He used his anecdotes of intelligent behaviour in animals to write a book.
• He came up with a more or less linear progression of intelligence in animals.
• Insects -> Birds ->Apes ->Humans
• Justitication for this is around the phylogenetic complexity or the way in which animals have evolved.
• Although, this is an incorrect tweet of life, insects didn't evolve into birds, birds didn't evolve into apes, apes didn't evolve into humans.

Folie 5

• 
• Also a simple tree of life but more correct - that we have common ancestors throughout the animal kingdom.
• We have single celled organisms (i.e. protozoa), which evolved into complex invertebrates (i.e. jelly fish), and they evolved into backboned animals, into reptiles, reptiles evolved into modern reptiles, there are birds and mammals that have evolved from reptiles.

Justification for rankings - Brain size

• 
• We might want to take into account the size of the animal's body as well as the brain.
• Jerison tried to consider this, taking the ratio of brain weight to body weight.
• He developed what became known as a Cephalisation index, which is a little bit more complicated than a simple division of brain to body weight. It is important to know that it is a ration of brain weight to body weight.
• In using that Cephalisation index, what you see is that animals like humans have very large brains compared to their bodies.
• Animals like dolphins and monkeys have very large brains for the size of their bodies, and domestic animals like sheep and cats don't.
• Bildunterschrift: Jerison (1973)

Learning

• Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that results from experience.
• Operant or Instrumental conditioning
• Response -> Food
• Pavlovian or Classical conditioning
• Stimulus -> Food
• it is hard to measure knowledge because it is internal/ something that is private to the animal.
• So we might use a more behaviourist definition of learning, which is that learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that results from experience.
• That way if you want to determine if anybody has acquired knowledge, then you would have to see a change of behaviour in order to do that.
• We have seen two types of learning, operant/instrumental conditioning and Pavlovian/ classical conditioning.
• So people have looked at differences between species and their ability to acquire those kinds of learning problems.

Probs w speed of learn as measure of intel

• Skard (1950s):
• Did experiments with rats in a maze.
• Looked to see at different choice points did they turn left or right or straight to find some food reward.
• How many trials did it take them to learn to this? Compared with humans.
• Rats learnt just as fast as humans, but yet we might not say that rats are as intelligent as humans.
• But in that test there is an unexpected between species difference which is that the rats learn just as quickly as humans do.
• Angemeire (1980s)
• Did this with more species.
• He trained animals to perform an operant behaviour - rats to press a lever, birds to peck a disc, goldfish had to press a disc. Tested a variety of species e.g. rats, rabbits, chicken, fish etc.
• He found an unexpected pattern of behaviour - fish were quickest to acquire this task, then chickens, then rats, then rabbits.
• In a later experiment someone tried to do this with human infants - babies.
• Looking at a mobile and had to learn to turn their eyes in a particular direction and their head in a particular direction to gain a social reward.
• Babies learnt the least quickly out of all of those different species.
• So we get these unexpected between species differences in the speed of learning.

Jeff Bitterman

• He said the problem is that if you are comparing different species, you do not know if they are perceiving the task in the same way.
• E.g. for Angemeire, fish may perceive the disc differently than the rats perceive the lever. So it is easier for them to interact with the disc because they have perceptual differences that haven't been controlled for.
• Also you have motivational differences. The food might mean more for the fish than smiling means for the infant.
• He called these contextual differences.

Garcia and Koelling (1966)

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• Bildunterschrift: Garcia and Knelling (1966)
• Did an experiment with rats.
• Could argue that Jeff Bitterman was right here.
• The perceptual/ motivational demands are different - a shock isn't as motivating to the rat as the illness is.
• However, in second group, don't learn about illness but do learn about shock.
• Theree is a difference in the extent to which animals learn about those different types of cues,

Biological Relevance

• Garcia and others have explained those kinds of results in the form of biological relevance,
• that evolution has provided certain animals with the ability to learn about certain types of associations more readily than other types of associations.
• Brain associated flavours with illness more easily than flavour associated with a shock.

Intelligence as Information Processing

• Memory.
• Learning.
• Reasoning.
• Navigation.
• Communication.
• Intelligence requires you to be able to learn.
• It requires you to be able to remember things for a long time, or remember or learn certain types of information.
• It might involve you being able to reason your way through certain problems or navigating/ communicating effectively.
• So Psychologists have taken the view that rather than intelligence being a single thing that we can measure in animals, we need to look at ut in terms of information processing.
• How do animals process certain types of information?

Animal memory

• Definition of memory - "when current behaviour is under the influence of past experience".
• This is an objective, overt measure of behaviour, rather than a measure of some internal/subjective feeling of "I remembered this before".
• Because we might be able to report that we have a feeling that we remembered something before, but it is very difficult to get that from an animal.
• So we are going to use these objective behaviours as a better way of examining memory in animals.

Location of hidden food

• Vander Wall (1982) - Clack's nutcracker.
• Type of crow called a nutcracker. They have a sublingual pouch for getting hold of seeds and storing them in their pouch, and taking them away and storing in different locations.
• They store their food in the Autumn time - dig holes in the ground and come back and retrieve them at a later time.
• However, the world might look vert different when going back to collect the food 3 months later - evidence suggests they are using their memory.
• Field studies of these birds recovering their food cashes suggests that they store 3000 different food items, and retrieve 90% of those food items having stored them before.
• Long-lasting memory that occurs.

Photographs p1

• Experiment with pigeons where they trained them to respond to just squiggles on a screen.
• Some squiggles when they appear are followed by food and some are not.
• They presented them with 80 pictures followed by food and 80 pictures that were not.
• They came to respond in the presence of food predicting pictures and withholding their responding in the presence of non-food predicting pictures.
• It took a long time for them to learn to do this.
• However, they waited about a year and then gave them the same pictures again, and they responded to these items about chance levels.
• So they had a very long-lasting memory.
• 
• Bildunterschrift: Vaughan & Greene (1984)

Photographs p2

• In another experiment they conducted, they gave them everyday pictures.
• Some of the pictures were associated with food and some pictures were not.
• They started out with 40 of each of these slides and added another 40 and another 40, until they reached 3210 slides which were associated with food and 320 slides which were not associated with food.
• They again found that they were cable of remembering which ones were associated with food and which ones were not.
• 
• Bildunterschrift: Vaughan & Greene (1984)

Animal Memory

• Time - periodic
• -Circadian Clock
• When things happen during the day e.g. when to wake up, when to eat and when to sleep. That is usually driven by a circadian clock.
• Time - interval
• -Church and Deluty (1977)
• -Church and Gibbon (1982)
• Shorter durations of time.

Animal memory-Church and Deluty (1977)

• Trained rats to press a lever to get a food reward in a conditioning chamber.
• Then they made them discriminate between two levers.
• The left lever was rewarded if a tone was played for 4 seconds.
• The right lever was rewarded if a tone played for 16 seconds.
• So if they heard a short tone they had to press a left, and a long tone had to press right.
• They learnt to discriminate between these 2 things and remembered information about how long a stimulus had occurred for and that controlled their behaviour so they must have remembered that.

Animal memory-Church and Gibbon

• Had lights on for a certain period of time, then turned the lights off.
• When they turned them on again, a lever was pushed in the box and they would respond to the lever.
• Whether the animals got rewarded for pressing a lever depended on how long the lights had been off for (4 seconds).
• After they trained the rats to do this, they then altered how long the lights were off for, from 0.8 to 7.2 seconds.
• They found that the animals could remember exactly how long the lights had been off for in order to control their behaviour.
• So there is evidence that animals can remember the duration of particular stimuli.

Number - Clever Hans

• Clever Hans was trained by Von Osten and tested by Pfungst (1908).
• Horse in Germany - owner beloved he could count things i.e. how many people in photograph wearing a hat.
• He would start tapping his hooves and the audience would applaud so he knew how many hats there were.
• He would also solve problems like fractions.
• However, it turned out that Hans didn't actually know the answer but was responding to the behaviour of the crowd - they would hold their breathe in anticipation and when he got the right answer they would go "ahh".

Number - Meck and Church (1983)

• Russ Church has shown that rats are able to distinguish the number of events that have occurred.
• They had 4 tones, which were associated with a left lever, and 16 tones that were associated with the right lever. Some people might argue that the time it takes to present 4 tones is shorter than the time it takes to present 16 tones.
• But Meck and Church carried out a test where they equated the time it took to present the 16 tones and 4 tones, and the animals could still tell the difference between which lever they should press on to get the food reward.
• So here is an example of rats that they are able to remember the number of things that occurred.

Number - Brannon and Terrace (2000)

• 
• Bildunterschrift: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 26, 31-49.
• They used rhesus monkeys. They presented them with a touch screen and there were 4 stimuli that could appear. For left screen, 16 locations where the stimuli could occur. So they could randomly occur within those 16 locations, e.g. A is where they could occur on trial one and B on trial 2. The monkeys had to press the touch screen/ stimuli in the rising order of the number of items they could see. So the monkeys could do this, they learnt that they could press 1,2,3 and 4 items. It look them quite a long time to train them to do this, but they did it.
• Some people could say that there is an issue because it is not the number of items that they can see, they are not counting 1,2,3 or 4 or whatever representation they have of 1,2,3 or 4. What you see is, say there is more black in one stimulus (square tile) than the other stimulus, all they have learnt is to press items in the decreasing amount of black that they can see, or something to do with the luminescence of the stimuli.

Number - Pepperberg (1994)

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• Parrot called Alex. Very clever. N
• Had a very human-like ability of being able to count how many green blocks etc.
• However, we can count to quite a large number but Alex couldn’t.
• He had a limit of around 8 or 9 items.
• However, it is possible that instead of counting in this way, instead he was doing something called subitising, a perceptual problem.