Links for Keyword: Intelligence

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About Death, Just Like Us or Pretty Much Unaware?

By NATALIE ANGIER As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead. Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all. Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said the primatologist Sarah Hrdy. Only gradually will she allow the distance between herself and the ever-gnarlier carcass to grow. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior
Link ID: 12003 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of the Human Mind

By Ursula Dicke and Gerard Roth As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species—at least by our own definition of intelligence. Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities. But, anatomically, the human brain is very similar to that of other primates because humans and chimpanzees share an ancestor that walked the earth less than seven million years ago. Accordingly, the human brain contains no highly conspicuous characteristics that might account for the species’ cleverness. For instance, scientists have failed to find a correlation between absolute or relative brain size and acumen among humans and other animal species. Neither have they been able to discern a parallel between wits and the size or existence of specific regions of the brain, excepting perhaps Broca’s area, which governs speech in people. The lack of an obvious structural correlate to human intellect jibes with the idea that our intelligence may not be wholly unique: studies are revealing that chimps, among various other species, possess a diversity of humanlike social and cognitive skills. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc

Avian Cooperation: Rooks Work Together to Solve Puzzle for Food

By Emily Anthes Birds of a feather don’t just flock together—they also work together to obtain food. Recent research makes rooks the first nonprimates observed to successfully cooperate to retrieve a food-laden platform, according to a June 22 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Scientists at the University of Cambridge tested the rooks, which are Eurasian members of the crow family, by placing dishes of food on a platform out of reach of a bird enclosure. A single string looped from the enclosure to the platform and back again. Moving the platform closer required pulling on both ends of the string simultaneously, a feat that is only possible if two birds work together, each tugging on one end. The researchers found that rook pairs spontaneously learned how to solve the problem. “We were amazed that the rooks performed so well,” says lead author Amanda Seed, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s really hard to coordinate your actions. If you wait an extra second, you miss your chance.” Chimpanzees, and possibly a few other primates, are the only other species that have proved themselves capable of the same task. Rooks are extremely social birds, living in colonies of hundreds of members, and are likely to have faced evolutionary pressure to learn to cooperate, Seed says. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Chimp beats students at computer game

Ewen Callaway Remember this: even if the numbers flash up for only an instant, this chimp can remember where they were.Courtesy of the researchersA particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study. The work doesn't mean that chimps are 'smarter' than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their surroundings — whether that be numbers on a screen or ripe figs dangling from a tree. Humans may have lost this capacity in exchange for gaining the brainpower to understand language and complex symbols, says Matsuzawa. Two decades have passed since Matsuzawa’s team first taught a female chimp, Ai, to recognize and order Arabic numerals1. Later, he and Nobuyuki Kawai trained her to memorize the location of numbers as they flashed onto a computer screen. The numbers would be quickly covered with white squares, and Ai could then touch those squares in order of the numbers concealed beneath them2. After much training, chimps can be remarkably good at this task (see video, in real time). © 2007 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 11034 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm

By CARL ZIMMER If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants. Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock. Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible. “They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.” The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said. By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals. “No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior
Link ID: 10965 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Head Size and IQ: Is There a Link?

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Big-headed people could be brainier too, according to a new analysis of a 1939 study comparing head size and intelligence in a group of male prisoners. Although the effect of head size on IQ is minimal, it does exist, says Jeremy Genovese, who conducted the new research and is an associate professor of human development and educational psychology at Cleveland State University. "The correlations between head size and IQ are quite modest, and you cannot determine someone's intelligence with a tape measure," he told Discovery News. "However, the correlation is real and might have some clinical significance, such as predicting susceptibility to dementia." Genovese explained that "larger bodies do require larger brains to support larger nervous systems," but he added that the notable difference in body size between men and women appears to have "no relationship to intelligence." For the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Genovese obtained copies of the 1939 inmate data, which was collected by Harvard anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooten. Hooten gathered anthropological and sociological records on roughly 12 percent of American prison inmates. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 10771 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Intelligence: Do We Get It?

Sue Major Holmes, Associated Press — Rex Jung says researchers need to understand how the brain is put together to better understand how it unravels. To that end, Jung — a research scientist at the Mind Research Network — and psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California Irvine's School of Medicine scoured the neuroscience literature and analyzed studies of reasoning and measures of intelligence to put together a theoretical model aimed at letting researchers study intelligence in a more systematic way. There's a lot of interest in measuring intelligence and how people solve tasks that require reasoning, said Jung. "The terms intelligence and IQ are just so infused in our culture. ... We like to know fundamentally how our brains differ from others," he said. Intelligence — the capacity of the brain to function well in a given setting — can be affected by such diseases as schizophrenia or Alzheimer's. "Understanding how the brain produces intelligent behavior may allow us to address the cognitive decline associated with some of these devastating diseases," Jung said. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Older siblings are smarter

Katharine Sanderson Eldest sibblings are, on average, 2.3 IQ points more intelligent than their younger brothers and sisters, says a study of Norweigan kids. And it's not necessarily being born first that makes the difference — it's being raised as the eldest child. It has been proposed for some time that, on average across a population, first-borns are more intelligent than their younger brethren. There are more first-born sons in prominent positions than might be expected, for example. And some studies have shown a link between birth order and intelligence: the later born, the less smart the child. But the reasons behind this trend, and even whether it's real, have been hotly debated. Families with low-intelligence children tend to be large (perhaps a big brood leaves little time for helping with homework), so the observation that sixth-born children aren't very smart, for example, could just be a side effect of this, critics have said. Petter Kristensen, from the University of Oslo, and Tor Bjerkedal from the Norwegian Armed Forces Medical Services in Oslo looked at data gathered from 241,310 Norwegian kids, all aged 18 or 19 years old at the time of intelligence testing. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Mozart doesn't make you clever

Alison Abbott Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry. The ministry commissioned the report — surprisingly the first to systematically review the literature on the purported intelligence effect of music — from a team of nine German neuroscientists, psychologists, educationalists and philosophers, all music experts. The ministry felt it had to tackle the subject because it had been inundated with requests for funding of studies on music and intelligence, which it didn't know how to assess. The interest in this scientific area was first sparked by the controversial 1993 Nature report1 in which psychologist Frances Rauscher and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, claimed that people perform better on spatial tasks — such as recognizing patterns, or folding paper — after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes. The 'Mozart effect' remained a marketing tool for the music industry, and some private schools, long after a torrent of additional studies started to cast doubt on the finding. In the wild commercial flurry, which often involved over-interpretation of available data, the issues of listening to music and actively practicing music were frequently mixed up. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 10177 - Posted: 06.24.2010

City Squirrels Built to Rough It

Don Babwin, Associated Press — Squirrels hit the genetic lottery with their chubby cheeks and bushy tails. It's hard to imagine picnickers tossing peanuts and cookies at the rodents if they looked like rats. But good looks alone don't get you through Chicago winters. Nor do they help negotiate a treacherous landscape of hungry cats, cars and metal traps. So how do they do it? And why do they search, huddle, dart, and sometimes forget where they hid their nuts? Joel Brown aims to find out. "We're trying to get a glimpse of what your life is like if you are a city squirrel," said Brown, a biologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He and a team of students will trap squirrels in Chicago and its suburbs this winter, taking skin samples for DNA analysis. They'll strap collars on them and watch what they do. And they'll attach threads to acorns and hazelnuts, then see where the squirrels take them and when they eat them. While the methods aren't unlike those used to study animals in exotic lands, little attention has been paid to those in human neighborhoods. It is, after all, a lot sexier to track gorillas in Africa than a squirrel on Main Street. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 9730 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pea-Brains Make Best Prey, Study Finds

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Predators prefer to chase smaller-brained prey, which often lack the mental fortitude to escape their brainier hunters, according to a recent study. The findings, published in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, suggest brain size evolution may be driven by predator-prey relationships since, like a perpetual "Road Runner" cartoon, each side is forever trying to outwit the other. While there has been a consistent increase in relative brain size, and therefore intelligence, over most mammal groups throughout evolutionary time, predator-prey relationships have led to an intelligence divide, said lead researcher Susanne Shultz. "One could make the argument that there has been an arms race of sorts between prey and their predators, said Shultz, a scientist in the Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Ecology Research Group at the University of Liverpool, England. "As prey get better at evading their predators, there is strong selection on predators to adopt counter strategies to better catch prey." Shultz and colleague R.I.M. Dunbar studied data on animals from five forest communities in two continents. The animals came from Taï National Park in West Africa, the Ituri forest in the Republic of Congo, Mahale National Park in Tanzania, Kibale National Park in Uganda and Manu National Park in Peru. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Animal Intelligence Resists Definition

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — People generally define intelligence in terms that place our own species at the apex, but recent studies on other animals suggest skills such as abstract thinking, problem solving, reasoning, and language — once thought unique to us — may not be so uncommon after all. "The closer we examine animals, the more they surprise us with their intelligence and awareness," said Jonathan Balcombe, a research scientist at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, DC. "Chickens practice deception, pigeons can categorize images in photographs as quickly as we can, a gorilla plays a joke on a human teacher, and a tiny fish leaps from one tide pool to another using a mental map formed during high tide." Balcombe did admit that in the evolutionary lottery, humans got lucky. Factors such as climate, the need for socialization, and challenges associated with foraging for intermittently available food may have contributed to our unique skill set. Taken individually or in other combinations, though, these skills are being increasingly noticed in other creatures. © 2006 Discovery Communications Inc.

Cortex Matures Faster in Youth with Highest IQ

Youth with superior IQ are distinguished by how fast the thinking part of their brains thickens and thins as they grow up, researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showed that their brain’s outer mantle, or cortex, thickens more rapidly during childhood, reaching its peak later than in their peers — perhaps reflecting a longer developmental window for high-level thinking circuitry. It also thins faster during the late teens, likely due to the withering of unused neural connections as the brain streamlines its operations. Drs. Philip Shaw, Judith Rapoport, Jay Giedd and colleagues at NIMH and McGill University report on their findings in the March 30, 2006 issue of Nature. “Studies of brains have taught us that people with higher IQs do not have larger brains. Thanks to brain imaging technology, we can now see that the difference may be in the way the brain develops,” said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. While most previous MRI studies of brain development compared data from different children at different ages, the NIMH study sought to control for individual variation in brain structure by following the same 307 children and teens, ages 5-19, as they grew up. Most were scanned two or more times, at two-year intervals. The resulting scans were divided into three equal groups and analyzed based on IQ test scores: superior (121-145), high (109-120), and average (83-108). “Brainy children are not cleverer solely by virtue of having more or less gray matter at any one age,” explained Rapoport. “Rather, IQ is related to the dynamics of cortex maturation.”

In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

Until West Nile virus swept through in 2002 and killed it, a murder of crows had dominated the skies around my home in northwest Washington, D.C., for more than 15 years. Their preferred roost was the roof of a house kitty-corner across the alley from my backyard. Next door, a pair of mockingbirds invariably nested in a pear tree. And every summer, at least once or twice, I watched a crow sally into the pear tree, snatch an egg or nestling from the mockingbird nest, and carry it back to the roof, seemingly oblivious to the mockingbirds' frantic distress. The parents fearlessly mobbed the cradle robber, but to no avail. Some people might have found these scenes distasteful—mockingbirds, after all, are much cuter than crows—but I miss seeing such wild displays of nature red in tooth and claw in my tame urban habitat. While urbanization has dealt a death blow to many bird species, American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) thrive on it. So do several of the other 45 species of birds in the widespread genus Corvus, which includes ravens, jackdaws, and the rook. (For simplicity, I'll refer to them all collectively as crows unless a distinction is in order.) At the same time, some other crow species have suffered mightily from human actions. Two species of crows that once lived in Hawaii were wiped out by the Polynesian settlers of these islands, while the third, of which a small number now exists only in captivity, was the victim of more recent habitat loss and introduced diseases. For better or worse, though, relationships between crows and people are ancient and intricate, so much so, the authors of In the Company of Crows and Ravens argue, that people influence the evolution and culture of crows and, most intriguingly, vice versa. Copyright 2005 Friends of the National Zoo.

Born Supremacy?

by Elizabeth Svoboda For Rüdiger Gamm, the stakes were high. When the starting signal sounded, the second timed trial would begin, and he would have a final chance to better his score. For one minute, his only focus would be the fifty randomly chosen dates between the years 1600 and 2100 that appeared on the piece of paper in front of him. To figure out which day of the week each date fell on, he would have to work fast, but not too fast: If he got more than one answer wrong, he would be disqualified, no matter how many right answers came afterward. But if he could better Matthias Kesselschläger, Gamm would have what he had come to Annaberg-Buchholz seeking: the title of first-ever “Mental Calculation World Cup Winner for the category Calendar from Memory.” But that was not to be. The two Germans would finish first and second in the 2004 calendar calculations competition, but Kesselschläger would best Gamm’s twenty-two correct results with thirty-three of his own—a new world record. Still, Gamm, now thirty-four, is considered one of the best human calculators in the world, able to multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. He also can calculate ninth powers and fifth roots, and divide one integer by another to sixty decimal places. What may be even more remarkable is that up until the age of twenty, he had no interest—and no talent—in math. © 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine.

Elephants Pay Respects to Their Dead

By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News — Elephants pay homage to the bones of their dead, gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet, according to the first systematic study of elephant empathy for the dead. The finding provides the first hard evidence to support stories of elephant mourning, in which the pachyderms are said to congregate at elephant cemeteries, drawn by the bones of their kin. It also shows that these animals display a trait once thought to be unique to humans, said Karen McComb, an expert on animal communication and cognition at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. "Most mammals show only passing interest in the dead remains of their own or other species," McComb and colleagues wrote in the current issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Lions are typical in this respect: they briefly sniff or lick a dead of their own species before starting to devour the body. Chimpanzees show more prolonged and complex interactions with dead social partners, but leave them once the carcass starts decomposing. © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Good Video Games

Laparoscopic surgeon Butch Rosser had an epiphany several years ago when a reporter sat in on one of his procedures and wrote, "I saw the work of the Nintendo surgeon." "Now that just hit me when I read that," says Rosser, who is now director of minimally invasive surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. "And I said, 'Well I am a gamer, all the way back to the days of pong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong . Is that why I can do this a little better than the average bear? Is that why this seems so natural to me? Because I navigate in a video game environment?'" Laparoscopic surgeons work by cutting very small holes in a person's skin and inserting what are essentially long joysticks — with a fiber optic camera and surgical tools attached to the end of them — into a person's body to perform "minimally invasive surgery". Without having to cut a person open to look inside, the tiny camera allows them to operate by seeing everything on a video monitor, while making post-surgery recovery much easier. The similarities between this kind of procedure and playing video games struck Rosser so much, he did his own study in 2004 where he compared the surgical skills of surgeons who played video games with those who did not. Skill was measured in a standardized laparoscopic training exercise created by Rosser called "Top Gun." © ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 7735 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Migrating Birds Lack Smarts

By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News — Birds fly south in search of warmer climates because they lack the brains to survive harsh winter conditions, according to a new study. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, the research suggests that non-migrating species have bigger brains and are more creative at finding food in the hard winter months. Daniel Sol of the Independent University of Barcelona in Spain and colleagues reanalyzed previous observations of 134 songbird species breeding in the Western Palaearctic region, which includes Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. They divided the songbird species into three groups: long-distance migrants that winter south of Sahara; short-distance migrants that winter south of its breeding range but north of Sahara; and year-round residents. It emerged that species that stayed in one place were more creative in finding food. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Gamers' brains no different than yours or mine

By Alison Drain — Video games, which reveal disconnects between a set of young television addicts and their elders, could bridge a generation gap. While Mortal Combat, Grand Theft Auto, or Halo may be foreign to aging generations, a new study out of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Toronto suggests that video games like these promote a kind of mental "expertise" that could prove to be useful in the non-virtual world - potentially in rehabilitation and for the elderly. Alan Castel, Ph.D., Washington University post doctorate fellow in psychology in Arts & Sciences, conducted a study to examine how video games can lead to a degree of expertise in certain domains, and how that might influence video game players' visual search patterns. Castel's research compares twenty college-aged, expert video game players, those who log more than ten — and upwards of 20 — hours of game time per week, to non-players, to determine how video game specialization influences human visual attention capacity and our environmental stimuli search patterns. Castel found, in short, that gamers showed a 20% reduction in response times as opposed to non-gamers, averaging reactions 100 milliseconds speedier than non-players'.

Can You Count Your Chickens?

Roger Harris Imagine life without numbers. Science as we know it would be impossible and, indeed, so would modern civilization. Yet, some societies get along just fine without numbers greater than four or five. Two studies of Amazonian rainforest tribes reported simultaneously in the journal Science (October 15) used this paucity to shed light on how people perceive, learn and reason with numbers. In one of the investigations, a French team of cognitive neuroscientists led by Pierre Pica from Paris University studied speakers of Mundurukú in central Brazil. Mundurukú lacks vocabulary for numbers beyond 5, so it's a natural experiment for investigating the process of counting—associating real things with abstract symbols such as words. But how is anyone able to count at all? To answer this question, team member Stanislas Dehaene developed a neuronal-network model of number processing, which is built on behavioral and brain-imaging studies. He hypothesizes that human beings have a "number sense," an evolutionarily ancient cerebral system that enables people to approximate quantities. This system is capable only of simple computations, but humans have tweaked it by inventing cultural "tools" such as number symbols and counting routines. These confer the ability to perform accurate calculations. Because the Mundurukú have so few number words, they're ideal to test this hypothesis. To do so, the French scientists devised a series of simple experiments based on presenting subjects with various numbers of dots on a solar-powered laptop computer screen. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

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