When people talk about smart animals, they're usually talking about
your Great Apes, your cetaceans, sometimes parrots
Maybe crows, or octopi
If they're trying to be really indie,
And yes, those animals are all super smart
But what about pigeons?
According to a 2009 study by the University of Iowa and the national research center of France,
Pigeons can match objects according to completely abstract qualities.
By pecking at a touchscreen, pigeons first of all demonstrated that
they understood that two pennies were the same and that two nickels were the same
and that a penny and a nickel were different and so on.
These are called match-to-sample problems.
Sounds simple enough, right?
But then, the researchers showed the pigeons multiple sets of coins
and the pigeons understood that two pennies were similar to two nickels
and two pennies were different from a penny and a nickel.
They understood that two things that are the same have sameness in common with two other things that are the same.
Categorizing objects based on abstract relationships like this was once thought to be something
only humans could do.
Now that club has widened to include humans, great apes, and pigeons.
Meanwhile, rats have demonstrated capacity for metacognition.
That's the ability to think about your own thoughts.
At the University of Georgia, rats were given what's called a Duration Discrimination test.
Researchers would play them a tone and the rats would be given options to categorize that tone
as either short or long.
If they got the right answer, they got a big reward and if they the wrong answer, they got nothing.
But the rats were also given a small reward if they declined to take the test at all.
If only high school were like this.
Imagine going in to take your final exam, and the teacher stopped you at the door
and said "Hey! You could just walk away for a C."
If you thought you could get a higher grade on your own, go ahead and take the test!
But if you're pretty sure you're going to bomb it, that C is starting to sound pretty good.
It's a choice, though, that calls for the ability to know that you don't know something.
And rats had no problem with that concept.
When the length of the sounds got harder and harder to discriminate,
they were much more likely to just decline to take the test and get their little reward.
People say "I think, therefore I am," so rats are at least on the level of
"I think that I want snacks!"
I've actually met quite a few humans whose thinking generally stops there.
You probably also know that pigs are smart.
But did you know that pigs will lie to and trick other pigs?
Not only do pigs fly through the conventional animal intelligence tests
like being able to recognize themselves in a mirror and play video games with a joy stick,
which I would really watching, by the way!
They should have a Let's Play channel just with pigs!
They also passed a shadier measurements of animal cognition
like testing their capacity to screw each other over.
First, they let a small pig explore the room.
Once it found the food, they leave it out again and then bring it back in with a much bigger pig friend.
The bigger pigs quickly learned to follow the smaller pigs who remembered where the food was,
they just muscled the little pig out of the way and take all the food for themselves.
So the small pigs learned to trick the big ones.
They'd lead the big pigs down blind corridors or wander around the room
until the bigger pigs gave up on following them or just dash off as soon as the big pig's back was turned.
So pigs can be duplicitous. Just like us!
And actually, all of these experiments essentially define intelligence as thinking like humans
but there are lots of animals that may not exhibit higher reasoning as we describe it,
but are much better at certain kinds of thinking than we are.
Like a honeybee's ability to make an internal map which lets it find its way straight home,
even if you drop it in a completely unfamiliar place.
Or a nutcrackers knack for remembering where it's cached up the 30,000 nuts each year.
It may turn out that animals can do many things that humans can do, just not as well.
Which just makes our world an exciting place to be!
Thanks for watching this SciShow Dose. If you'd like to learn more about all kinds of animals,
check out our partner channel, Animal Wonders, over at youtube.com/animalwondersmontana.
And if you want to become as smart as a pigeon or a rat or a pig,
then don't forget to go to youtube.com/scischow and subscribe.