Overriding Their Animal Impulses

[n2doc]

When it comes to animal intelligence, says Evan MacLean, co-director of Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center, don’t ask which species is smarter. “Smarter at what?” is the right question.

Many different tasks, requiring many different abilities, are given to animals to measure cognition. And narrowing the question takes on particular importance when the comparisons are across species.

So Dr. MacLean, Brian Hare and Charles Nunn, also Duke scientists who study animal cognition, organized a worldwide effort by 58 scientists to test 36 species on a single ability: self-control.

This capacity is thought to be part of thinking because it enables animals to override a strong, nonthinking impulse, and to solve a problem that requires some analysis of the situation in front of them.

The testing program, which took several international meetings to arrange, and about seven years to complete, looked at two common tasks that are accepted ways to judge self-control. It then tried to correlate how well the animals did on the tests with other measures, like brain size, diet and the size of their normal social groups.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/science/overriding-their-animal-impulses.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0