Intelligence in Nonprimates

We humans value intelligence because we tend to have more of it than other species. But the flexibility implied by intelligence is not as reliable as genetically predisposed behavior and is only valuable when environments change. Nevertheless, environments do change and many species do have the flexibility to adapt behaviorally to those changes either through simple Pavlovian or instrumental learning or through more complex cognitive mechanisms. For example, in addition to the absolute properties of stimuli, animals appear to be able to use the relation between stimuli to guide their behavior and they can also learn general principles of learning (learning how to learn). More interesting, perhaps, they can form stimulus classes of stimuli that have perceptually common characteristics (trees or water) and even classes of arbitrary stimuli that share a common meaning (stimulus equivalence). When it comes to memory, animals appear to have flexibility in remembering not only events that they have already experienced (retrospectively) but also events that they expect to experience (prospectively), and they appear to have some control over what they will and will not remember. Evidence suggests further that they have some representation of their environment, such that when necessary, they can take a novel pathway to get to a goal (cognitive mapping), and they have rudimentary numerical competence. Although their ability to reason may be limited, they do show transitive inference behavior, the ability to imitate actions that they cannot see when they perform them, and some animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Interestingly, studying animal intelligence can also lead us to more critically examine the origins of what has been thought to be certain complex human behavior. For example, humans tend to value rewards more when they have to expend greater effort to obtain them (cognitive dissonance or justification of effort) but this tendency is also found in other animals and may more parsimoniously be explained as an example of contrast (between the effort expended and the reward obtained). Similarly, the suboptimal tendency that humans often have to choose alternatives that have a very low probability of a high payoff (commercial gambling) can be found in other animals and appears to result from a general tendency to discount losses and focus on the value of gains rather than their probability. Overall, it appears that other animals have (to some degree), many of the cognitive abilities of humans, while also suffering from some of the suboptimal behavior thought to be attributable to human culture.