Pigeons can outperform college students (at some tasks, anyway)

In a 2010 study, psychologists at Whitman College found that pigeons outperformed college students on a variant of the Monty Hall problem. The birds recognized with some rapidity that they were most likely to earn a food reward when they switched their initial choice, while the humans, the researchers reported, “failed to adopt optimal strategies, even with extensive training.”

Our human-centered view of the world not only blinded us to the possibility of animal intelligence but also misled some of the scientists who actually did go looking for it. Often, the “IQ” tests we gave other species failed to reflect their unique biology, behavior, and lifestyles. For instance, Asian elephants flunked the classic mirror test — showing no sign of recognizing their own reflections — until researchers swapped the small, human-sized mirror they were using for a more, well, elephantine one. Likewise, octopuses initially seemed unable to learn how to open clear, plastic jars containing tasty crayfish. But the cephalopods often use chemical and tactile cues, rather than vision, to find prey; when the researchers smeared the outside of the jars with herring slime, the octopuses aced the task.

Even when studying our closest primate relatives, our anthropocentrism can set animals up to fail. Apes and monkeys, de Waal explains, appeared relatively unskilled at facial discrimination when researchers tested their ability to tell individual humans apart. But when de Waal and his colleagues presented chimps with photographs of other chimpanzees, the apes displayed a clear facility with faces. “In other words,” de Waal writes, “what is salient to us — such as our own facial features — may not be salient to other species. Animals often know only what they need to know.”

https://undark.org/article/i-think-therefore-i-am-a-bird-on-animal-intelligence/