Animal Intelligence Test: What Are They?
We know that animals are intelligent beings and that their abilities and skills change according to the species. There is a science that studies their cognitive abilities and in this article we explain how it does it through animal intelligence tests.
What are animal intelligence tests?
This science is a discipline that springs from the union of comparative psychology, ethology and behavioral ecology. Each of these fields brings part of their experience and methods to learn more about what happens in the brains of animals when they face different challenges.
Animal intelligence tests are based on the idea of ​​presenting small challenges to different animals and observing how they act. Their structuring depends on which species is being studied and, unlike other experiments with animals, scientists do not touch or manipulate them in any way: they only observe their reactions.
These tests do not cause harm to the animals that take part in them, at most they can feel confused at first, as they are presented with a problem that they have to solve. Animals act freely and the function of scholars is to observe their behavior.
There are different types of animal intelligence tests according to the object of study : cooperation, learning speed, memorization capacity, color observation; but also according to the species to be studied: you cannot devise the same experiment for a dog and a hamster.
History of animal intelligence tests
This scientific discipline began to be practiced during the twentieth century, although the advances in human psychology of the 1950s represent a significant impetus for its development.
In the beginning, the results of the animal intelligence tests were interpreted as demonstrating the ability of animals to act and react. In other words, their behavior was intended as mechanical : when faced with a situation, the animal learned to react in a certain way.
As the decades passed, however, the idea was introduced that perhaps animals were reflecting and not merely reacting. the concept of “mind” was therefore applied and the experiments were designed differently to test the thinking ability of animals.
At the same time, the data collection procedure has also changed: even if many experiments have a short duration, equal to just hours or days, at the end of the 20th century some experiments that would have lasted years were conceived. The variety of animals you work with has also grown: in the beginning only monkeys and dogs, but nowadays also fish or insects are subjected to these tests.
Examples of animal intelligence tests
Multiple tests of animal intelligence have been devised, although many share the same basis. Skinner’s mazes or boxes were among the most repeated early tests, even if they represented a starting point from which to create different ones.
Skinner’s boxes were a tool used to teach an animal to perform an action, such as pushing a lever or a button. Whenever the animal repeated the desired behavior, it received food. After verifying that the animals were learning, the first variations appeared.
To measure the sense of justice in the monkeys, two similar boxes were put together. Monkeys entering the boxes activated a lever and received a prize. However, one always received a tastier prize than her partner. The monkey who received the worst prize got angry and his mate tried to share his with him when he realized that scientists were unfair.
To test the ability to cooperate, it was thought to use another modified Skinner box: the animals could only access food if both pulled the rope together. This test was applied to several species of animals: parrots, elephants and wolves solved the problem in a short time. The dogs, on the other hand, were unable to access the prize.
Conclusions
There is a wide range of animal intelligence tests. These measure the abilities or skills of animals of different species and, although traditionally they have been employed with mammals, they have also been surpassed by insects, octopuses, fish or birds.
