Inside Animal Minds: The New Science of Animal Intelligence Read Free Page A

wanted to make. Now that,” Kacelnik said, “is a major kind of cognitive sophistication.”
    This is the larger lesson of animal cognition research: It humbles us. We are not alone in our ability to invent or plan or to contemplate ourselves—or even to plot and lie.
    Deceptive acts require a complicated form of thinking, because you must be able to attribute intentions to the other person and predict that person’s behavior. One school of thought argues that human intelligence evolved partly because of the pressure of living in a complex society of calculating beings. Chimpanzees,orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos share this capacity with us. In the wild, primatologists have seen apes hide food from the alpha male or have sex behind his back.
    Birds, too, can cheat. Laboratory studies show that western scrub jays can know another bird’s intentions and act on that knowledge. A jay that has stolen food itself, for example, knows that if another jay watches it hide a nut, there’s a chance the nut will be stolen. So the first jay will return to move the nut when the other jay is gone.
    “It’s some of the best evidence so far of experience projection in another species,” said Nicky Clayton in her aviary lab at Cambridge University. “I would describe it as, ‘I know that you know where I have hidden my stash of food, and if I were in your shoes I’d steal it, so I’m going to move my stash to a place you don’t know about.’ ”
    This study, by Clayton and her colleague Nathan Emery, is the first to show the kind of ecological pressures, such as the need to hide food for winter use, that would lead to the evolution of such mental abilities. Most provocatively, her research demonstrates that some birds possess what is often considered another uniquely human skill: the ability to recall a specific past event. Scrub jays, for example, seem to know how long ago they cached a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils.
    Human cognitive psychologists call this kind of memory “episodic memory,” and argue that it can exist only in a species that can mentally travel back in time. Despite Clayton’s studies, some refuse to concede this ability to the jays. “Animals are stuck in time,” explained Sara Shettleworth, a comparative psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, meaning that they don’t distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Because animals lack language, she said, they probably also lack “the extra layer of imagination and explanation” that provides the running mental narrative accompanying our actions.
    Such skepticism is a challenge for Clayton. “We have goodevidence that the jays remember the what, where, and when of specific caching events, which is the original definition of episodic memory. But now the goalposts have moved.” It’s a common complaint among animal researchers. Whenever they find a mental skill in another species that is reminiscent of a special human ability, the human cognition scientists change the definition. But the animal researchers may underestimate their power—their discoveries compel the human side to shore up the divide.
    “Sometimes the human cognitive psychologists can be so fixed on their definitions that they forget how fabulous these animal discoveries are,” said Clive Wynne of the University of Florida, who has studied cognition in pigeons and marsupials. “We’re glimpsing intelligence throughout the animal kingdom, which is what we should expect. It’s a bush, not a single-trunk tree with a line leading only to us.”
    Some of the branches on that bush have led to such degrees of intelligence that we should blush for ever having thought any animal a mere machine.
    In the late 1960s, a cognitive psychologist named Louis Herman began investigating the cognitive abilities of bottlenose dolphins. Like humans, dolphins are highly social and cosmopolitan, living in subpolar to tropical