Submitted by Bony_Geese t3_y3hhf2 in askscience
dbrodbeck t1_isbfoyp wrote
Reply to comment by csreid in Do crickets respond to TV’s and video audio, with their own sounds? by Bony_Geese
They know more than many give them credit for. My work has over the years focused on food storing birds. There are birds who store tens of thousands of seeds in a 40 km radius and recover the vast majority of them, months later. They use memory to do this.
The biggest trap you can get in is trying to rank order species on some made up 'evolutionary ladder' ranking of intelligence. You can study animal intelligence, but it's complicated.
Here's a good theoretical paper to get anyone started who is interested. It's old, but it's a bedrock type of thing, the ideas in here were, at the time, revolutionary, and now are generally accepted.
koreth t1_isc0y56 wrote
> You can study animal intelligence, but it’s complicated.
I’ve read that a recurring problem with research into reptile intelligence has been that the experiments are often based on experiments on mammal intelligence and don’t take into account biological differences that cause reptiles to respond differently. The example I’ve seen mentioned is that ambient temperature affects reptile behavior more (and differently) than it affects mammal behavior, meaning an intelligence test given in a cool air-conditioned room might underestimate a lizard’s intelligence level.
dbrodbeck t1_isc2uqj wrote
That paper I linked sort of talks about such things.
You have to look at the animal's life history, its evolutionary history, its brain etc. It's a very interdisciplinary thing. I'm a psychologist, but I'm also quite comfortable with zoologists and neuroscientists (to the point where I teach that stuff as well).
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