Animal Intelligence  

New research has demonstrated that multiple species of apes appear to understand that individuals have different perceptions about the world. This work overturns the human-only paradigm of the theory of mind, and once again shows that perhaps we are not the only intelligent animals on this planet.

New research on chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans suggests our primate relatives may also be able to tell when that someone’s beliefs may differ from reality. They also have been found to use this knowledge in their choice of actions.

The findings suggest the ability is not unique to humans, but has existed in the primate family tree for at least 13 to 18 million years, since the last common ancestors of chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and humans.

The study, led by researchers at Duke University, Kyoto University, the University of St. Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has been published in the journal Science.

As humans, we tend to believe that our cognitive skills are unique, not only in degree, but also in kind. Research like this shows that the more closely we look at other species, the clearer it becomes that the difference is one of degree. The researchers examined three different species of apes, finding they were able to anticipate that others may have mistaken beliefs about a situation.

The capacity to tell when others hold mistaken beliefs is seen as a key milestone in human cognitive development. We develop this awareness in early childhood, usually by the age of five. This step marks the beginning of a young child’s ability to fully comprehend the thoughts and emotions of others—what psychologists call theory of mind.

These skills are essential for getting along with other people and predicting what they might do. They also are the foundation our ability to trick people into believing something that isn’t true. Moreover, the inability to infer what others are thinking or feeling is considered an early sign of autism.

"This cognitive ability is at the heart of so many human social skills."

“This cognitive ability is at the heart of so many human social skills,” said Christopher Krupenye of Duke, who led the study along with comparative psychologist Fumihiro Kano of Kyoto University.

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To some extent apes can read minds too. Over the years, studies have shown that apes are remarkably skilled at understanding what others want, what others might know based on what they can see, and other mental states. But when it comes to understanding what someone else is thinking even when those thoughts are false, apes have consistently failed the test.

Understanding that beliefs may be false requires grasping, on some level, that not all things inside our heads correspond to reality, explained study co-author Michael Tomasello, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “It means understanding that there exists a mental world distinct from the physical world,” Tomasello said.

In the study, the apes watched two short videos. In the first, a person in a King Kong suit hides himself in one of two large haystacks while a man watches. Then the man disappears through a door, and while no one is looking the King Kong runs away. In the final scene the man reappears and tries to find King Kong.

The second video is similar, except that the man returns to the scene to retrieve a stone he saw King Kong hide in one of two boxes. But King Kong has since stolen it behind the man’s back and made a getaway.

The researchers teased out what the apes were thinking while they watched the movies by following their gaze with an infrared eye-tracker installed outside their enclosures.

“We offer them a little day at the movies,” said Krupenye, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “They really seem to enjoy it.”

To pass the test, the apes must predict that when the man returns, he will mistakenly look for the object where he last saw it, even though they themselves know it is no longer there. In both cases, the apes stared first and longest at the location where the man last saw the object, suggesting they expected him to believe it was still hidden in that spot.

Their results mirror those from similar experiments with human infants under the age of two, and suggest apes have taken a key first step toward fully understanding the thoughts of others.

“This is the first time that any nonhuman animals have passed a version of the false belief test,” Krupenye said. “If future experiments confirm these findings, they could lead scientists to rethink how deeply apes understand each other.”

SOURCE  Duke University

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Animal Intelligence  

Among our greatest achievements as humans, some might say, is our cumulative technological culture — the tool-using acumen that is passed from one generation to the next. As the implements we use on a daily basis are modified and refined over time, they seem to evolve right along with us.

Tool use in the New Caledonian crow, an extremely smart corvid and the only non-human species hypothesized to possess its own cumulative technological culture has been previously observed. How the birds transmit knowledge to each other is the focus of a study by Corina Logan, a junior research fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Sage Center for the Study of the Mind when she conducted her research. Currently, she is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. Her findings appear in the journal Learning & Behavior.

“We don’t know whether the crows have cumulative technological culture, and one of the reasons is that we don’t know how they learn,” said Logan. “There’s a hypothesis that says in order for cumulative technological culture to occur you need to copy the actions of another individual. And we don’t know whether the crows are paying attention to the actions of others when they learn from someone else.”

But the crows have been observed using tools they’ve made out of long, narrow, palm-like Pandanus leaves. “It has a serrated edge, and they cut into one side of the leaf, then make another cut farther down and then rip off the part in between,” Logan explained. “It makes a tool they can use to dig grubs out of logs.”

Even more curious, according to Logan, the crows have been observed using tools made of the same material but in different shapes — wide, narrow and stepped, which might be more structurally sound. However, no one has been able to explain the geographic variation in tool shapes — all three shapes are seen at the south end of Grand Terre in New Caledonia, while the stepped tool is more prevalent everywhere else.

“It’s thought that in order for tool shapes to be transmitted, one bird would have to watch another cutting the leaf and then mimic that bird’s actions,” Logan continued. “That would require imitation or emulation.”

Evidence of Social Learning

So Logan devised a study to look at all the learning mechanisms — social and asocial — the crows employ when solving a foraging problem. To level the playing field so that those birds with more experience with one particular tool don’t have an advantage over the others, Logan gave them a novel non-tool task.

She designed the experiment based on apparatus used by University of Leeds zoologist Will Hoppitt in a similar study he conducted on meerkats. “I used two apparatuses with multiple access points on each,” she said, “so we could look at whether the crows were imitating or emulating, whether they were just paying attention to another crow’s general location or whether they were paying attention to a specific area on an apparatus that another crow was interacting with.”

Logan and colleagues found that the crows don’t imitate or copy actions at all. “So there goes that theory,” she said. “Assuming how they learn in a non-tool context carries over to a tool context, they wouldn’t copy the actions of individuals they see cutting up Pandanus leaves to make tools.”

But Logan and her team did find strong evidence of social learning: If one crow sees a companion interacting with a particular area of the apparatus, reaching its bill through a door and pulling out a piece of boiled egg — the treat — the former is far more likely to try that particular door on either apparatus before choosing the other access options.

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“It’s called stimulus enhancement,” she explained. “That’s the social learning mechanism they’re using. But there’s another interesting aspect: Once they see another bird interact with the door, they go to that door and then begin to solve the problem on their own. And now they completely ignore social information and they just use trial and error learning to open the door and extract the food.”

Even if one crow is at an apparatus and tries unsuccessfully to open the door, if he or she sees another crow on the second apparatus actually solving the problem correctly, the first crow doesn’t use that information. “The social learning attracts them to a particular object and then they solve it through trial and error learning after that,” Logan said.

“So we thought, ‘Okay, if they don’t imitate or emulate, how could they still have cumulative technological culture?’” she continued. Perhaps it’s a combination of social learning and trial and error. Consider the grub digging. “In the wild, juveniles live with or near their parents for the first year or so,” she explained. “The juveniles see their parents make and use a particular tool shape. And often the parent will leave the tool inside the hole in the log and the juveniles will grab it and start interacting with it.”

Similar to the stimulus enhancement Logan and her team identified initially, the crow parents could draw their children’s attention to the tools to make them more likely to interact with the tools. In addition, wild juveniles appear to learn how to use the tool through trial and error over the course of several months.

"We’re suggesting it could be that they’re copying the end result of another crow’s action, but they’re not copying the actual actions of the other crows."

“We’re suggesting it could be that they’re copying the end result of another crow’s action, but they’re not copying the actual actions of the other crows,” Logan continued. “It’s actually a form of emulation but it doesn’t involve the copying actions that were hypothesized previously.”

Everyone’s a Teacher

For this study, Logan placed the crows in small groups. One was a family that consisted of two parents and their two sons; another included two mated pairs that weren’t related; and the third was made up of an adult and five juveniles. One of the juveniles was likely the adult’s daughter but the rest were unrelated. It had been previously hypothesized that juveniles do most of the learning, with adults picking up very little, if anything, from the youngsters or from each other.

It turns out this was mistaken. “It didn’t matter what group it was,” Logan said. “Everyone learned from everyone — juveniles from juveniles, adults from adults, juveniles from adults, adults from juveniles. It seems that if they have the opportunity, they’ll learn from anyone. But because they live in family groups, it seems to constrain who they have the opportunity to learn from in the wild.”

Logan plans to replicate the study with the great-tailed grackle, another highly intelligent bird. “They are expanding their range really rapidly,” she said. “There are many questions about how they learn to forage so successfully in new environments. Are they learning from other species about what to forage on when they encounter a new food type? Or are they exploring on their own, using their own information?”

According to Logan, studies such as this broaden our understanding of the nature of cumulative technological culture. If it can spread through other mechanisms, such as stimulus enhancement — simply drawing one’s attention to something and imprinting on a particular way of doing things — it could expand scientists’ ideas about where they should look for cumulative culture in general, and cumulative technological culture in particular.

SOURCE  UC Santa Barbara

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Longevity  

For the first time, research has pointed to a genetic link between intelligence and longevity. The finding have important implications for public health, and for those interested in the genetics of intelligence, lifespan or inequalities in health outcomes including lifespan.

The tendency of more intelligent people to live longer has been shown, for the first time, to be mainly down to their genes by new research published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

By analyzing data from twins, researchers found that 95 per cent of the link between intelligence and lifespan is genetic. The researchers found that, within twin pairs, the brighter twin tends to live longer than the less bright twin and this was much more pronounced in fraternal (non identical) twins than in identical twins.

This is the first study to test for a genetic association between intelligence and lifespan.

Studies that compare genetically identical twins with fraternal twins –  who only share half of their twin’s DNA –   help distinguish the effects of genes from the effects of shared environmental factors such as housing, schooling and childhood nutrition.

"Our research shows that the link between intelligence and longer life is mostly genetic."

Rosalind Arden, a research associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), said: “We know that children who score higher in IQ-type tests are prone to living longer. Also, people at the top of an employment hierarchy, such as senior civil servants, tend to be long-lived. But, in both cases, we have not understood why.

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“Our research shows that the link between intelligence and longer life is mostly genetic. So, to the extent that being smarter plays a role in doing a top job, the association between top jobs and longer lifespans is more a result of genes than having a big desk.

“However, it’s important to emphasize that the association between intelligence and lifespan is small. So you can’t, for example, deduce your child’s likely lifespan from how he or she does in their exams this summer.”

The researchers looked at three different twin studies from Sweden, the United States and Denmark where both intelligence and age of death was recorded, and where at least one twin in each pair had died.  Only twins of the same sex were included in the analysis.

On the reasons for the findings, Rosalind Arden said: “It could be that people whose genes make them brighter also have genes for a healthy body.  Or intelligence and lifespan may both be sensitive to overall mutations, with people with fewer genetic mutations being more intelligent and living longer. We need to continue to test these ideas to understand what processes are in play.”

SOURCE  London School of Economics and Political Science

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Intelligence  

Intelligence researchers have struggled with just how differences in intelligence are reflected in the human brain for many years. Now they have succeeded in studying further details relating to suspected functional differences in the brains of intelligent people.

The brains of more intelligent people are capable of solving tasks more efficiently, which is why these people have superior cognitive faculties, or as Elsbeth Stern, Professor for Research on Learning and Instruction at ETH Zurich, puts it: “when a more and a less intelligent person are given the same task, the more intelligent person requires less cortical activation to solve the task.” Scientists refer to this as the neural efficiency hypothesis, although it ceased being a hypothesis quite some time ago and is now accepted by experts as an undisputed fact, with ample evidence to support it.

The research has been published in the journal Intelligence.

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While working on her doctoral thesis in Stern's work group, Daniela Nussbaumer also found evidence of this effect for the first time in a group of people possessing above-average intelligence for tasks involving what is referred to as working memory. “We measured the electrical activity in the brains of university students, enabling us to identify differences in brain activity between people with slightly above-average and considerably above-average IQs,” explained Nussbaumer. Past studies conducted to identify the effect of neural efficiency have generally used groups of people that exhibit extreme variations in intelligence.

Facial memory tested

Psychologists define working intelligence as a person's ability to associate memories with new information as well as to adapt to changing objectives by filtering out information that has become irrelevant. The frontal lobe plays a pivotal role in these processes. In order to test these abilities, the ETH researchers asked 80 student volunteers to solve tasks of varying complexity on a computer.
One task, for example, was to determine whether individual letters or faces were part of a selection of letters or faces that had been shown to the subjects immediately beforehand.

An especially difficult task involved identifying letters and faces shown to the subjects during past runs of the test within a time limit. While the students were completing the tests, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure their brain activity. For the results analysis, the researchers had the subjects take a conventional IQ test and then split them into two groups: one with slightly above-average IQs and another with well above-average IQs.

Neural efficiency for moderately difficult tasks

The researchers found no differences in brain activity in either group of subjects when they performed very easy or very difficult tasks. They did, however, see clear differences in the case of moderately difficult tasks. Stern attributes this to the fact that none of the subjects had any trouble whatsoever with the simple tasks and that the difficult tasks were cognitively demanding even for the highly intelligent subjects. In contrast, all subjects succeeded in solving the moderately difficult tasks, but the highly intelligent subjects required fewer resources to do so.

"When a more and a less intelligent person are given the same task, the more intelligent person requires less cortical activation to solve the task."

Stern uses the analogy of a more and less efficient car: “When both cars are travelling slowly, neither car consumes very much fuel. If the efficient car travels at maximum speed, it also consumes a lot of fuel. At moderate speeds, however, the differences in fuel consumption become significant.”

Intelligence is not a muscle

So is it possible to use EEG measurements to draw any direct conclusions about intelligence? Stern qualifies the findings: “If you want to learn something about intelligence, you have to perform a conventional IQ test, because these tests still provide the most reliable results,” she says. EEG and other brain activity readings are not precise enough to assess the intelligence of an individual. Still, using these methods may be an interesting way to study how different levels of intelligence are manifested in the brain.

The ETH researchers' intelligence study also suggests that it is impossible to “exercise” working memory. This has been a controversial issue among scientists in recent years because of contradictory findings in different studies. If subjects practice a certain task for a prolonged period, they improve with time. As Stern and her peers have now shown in their study, people who have practised certain tasks do not have any advantage over their unpracticed counterparts when confronted with new, yet similar tasks.

SOURCE  EHT Zurich

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 Intelligence  

New research shows that infections can impair cognitive ability measured on an IQ scale. The study is the largest of its kind to date, and it shows a clear correlation between infection levels and impaired cognition.

A
nyone can suffer from an infection, for example in their stomach, urinary tract or skin. However, a new Danish study shows that a patient’s distress does not necessarily end once the infection has been treated. In fact, ensuing infections can affect your cognitive ability measured by an IQ test:

“Our research shows a correlation between hospitalization due to infection and impaired cognition corresponding to an IQ score of 1.76 lower than the average. People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average. The study thus shows a clear dose-response relationship between the number of infections, and the effect on cognitive ability increased with the temporal proximity of the last infection and with the severity of the infection. Infections in the brain affected the cognitive ability the most, but many other types of infections severe enough to require hospitalization can also impair a patient’s cognitive ability. Moreover, it seems that the immune system itself can affect the brain to such an extent that the person’s cognitive ability measured by an IQ test will also be impaired many years after the infection has been cured,” explains MD and PhD Michael Eriksen Benrós, who is affiliated with the National Centre for Register-Based Research at Aarhus BSS and the Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen.

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He has conducted the research in collaboration with researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University. 190,000 Danes participated in the study who have had their IQ assessed between 2006 and 2012. 35% of these individuals had a hospital contact with infections before the IQ testing was conducted.

According to Benrós, part of the explanation of the increased risk of impaired cognition following an infection may be as follows:

“Infections can affect the brain directly, but also through peripheral inflammation, which affects the brain and our mental capacity. Infections have previously been associated with both depression and schizophrenia, and it has also been proven to affect the cognitive ability of patients suffering from dementia. This is the first major study to suggest that infections can also affect the brain and the cognitive ability in healthy individuals.”

"This is the first major study to suggest that infections can also affect the brain and the cognitive ability in healthy individuals."

“We can see that the brain is affected by all types of infections. Therefore, it is important that more research is conducted into the mechanisms which lie behind the connection between a person’s immune system and mental health,” says Benrós.

He hopes that learning more about this connection will help to prevent the impairment of people’s mental health and improve future treatment.

Experiments on animals have previously shown that the immune system can affect cognitive capabilities, and more recent minor studies in humans have also pointed in that direction. Normally, the brain is protected from the immune system, but with infections and inflammation the brain may be affected. Benrós’ research suggests that it may be the immune system that causes the cognitive impairment, not just the infection, because many different types of infections were associated with a decrease in cognitive abilities.

This is the first study to examine these correlations in this manner. The results suggest that the immune system’s response to infections can possibly affect the brain and thereby also the person’s cognitive ability. This is in line with previous studies, some of which have also been conducted by Benrós, which show that infections are associated with an increased risk of developing mental disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

The researchers behind the study hope that their results may spur on further research on the possible involvement of the pin the development of psychiatric disorders and whether the discovered correlations contribute to the development of mental disorders or whether they may be caused by e.g. genetic liability toward acquiring infections in patients with reduced cognitive ability. The study has been adjusted for social conditions and parental educational levels; however, it cannot be ruled out that heritable and environmental factors associated with infections might also influence the associations.


SOURCE  Aarhus University

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 Autism  

New research suggests genes linked with a greater risk of developing autism may also be associated with higher intelligence.

Genes linked with a greater risk of developing autism may also be associated with higher intelligence, a study suggests.The relationship between autism and intelligence is not clear, researchers say. Although up to 70 per cent of individuals with autism have an intellectual disability, some people with the disorder have relatively well-preserved, or even higher than average, non-verbal intelligence, the team says.

Autism is a developmental disability that can cause significant language and speech difficulties. Non-verbal intelligence enables people to solve complex problems using visual and hands-on reasoning skills requiring little or no use of language.

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Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Queensland analysed almost 10,000 people recruited from the general population of Scotland. Individuals were tested for general cognitive ability and had their DNA analysed.

The team found that even among people who never develop autism, carrying genetic traits associated with the disorder is, on average, linked to scoring slightly better on cognitive tests. The researchers found further evidence of a link between autism-associated genes and intelligence when they carried out the same tests on 921 adolescents who were part of the Brisbane Adolescent Twin Study.

"Our findings show that genetic variation which increases risk for autism is associated with better cognitive ability in non-autistic individuals."

The study is published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Dr Toni-Kim Clarke, of the University of Edinburgh's Division of Psychiatry, who led the study, said: "Our findings show that genetic variation which increases risk for autism is associated with better cognitive ability in non-autistic individuals. As we begin to understand how genetic variants associated with autism impact brain function, we may begin to further understand the nature of autistic intelligence."

Professor Nick Martin, of the Queensland Institute for Medical Research, said: "Links between autism and better cognitive function have been suspected and are widely implied by the well-known "Silicon Valley syndrome" and films such as Rain Man as well as in popular literature. This study suggests genes for autism may actually confer, on average, a small intellectual advantage in those who carry them, provided they are not affected by autism."


SOURCE  The University of Edinburgh

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 Genetics  

Researchers have shown that the human version of a gene called FOXP2 makes it easier to transform new experiences into routine procedures. When they engineered mice to express humanized FOXP2, the mice learned to run a maze much more quickly than normal mice.

Mice that receive a human version of a speech and language gene display accelerated learning, according to a new study.

While the researchers are careful not to call this an uplift gene, the work reveals something new and fascinating about the evolution of human speech and language.

The gene for the protein called FOXP2 has been firmly linked to human speech and language. Humans with just one functional copy of this gene experience difficulties in learning and struggle with spoken and written language.

The investigators discovered the mice with the human form of FOXP2 learned profoundly faster than regular mice when both declarative and procedural forms of learning were involved. The scientists published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings suggest that FOXP2 may help humans with a key component of learning language -- transforming experiences, such as hearing the word "glass" when we are shown a glass of water, into a nearly automatic association of that word with objects that look and function like glasses, says Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor, member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a senior author of the study.

"This really is an important brick in the wall saying that the form of the gene that allowed us to speak may have something to do with a special kind of learning, which takes us from having to make conscious associations in order to act to a nearly automatic-pilot way of acting based on the cues around us."

“This really is an important brick in the wall saying that the form of the gene that allowed us to speak may have something to do with a special kind of learning, which takes us from having to make conscious associations in order to act to a nearly automatic-pilot way of acting based on the cues around us,” Graybiel says.

The gene itself is not unique—chimps have a version of it. But because the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged roughly 6 million years ago, they don't have two key changes in amino acids that humans have evolved.

To learn more about how FOXP2 alters the brain, scientists genetically engineered mice with the human form of FOXP2. In experiments with these rodents, the researchers focused on two modes of learning thought to be crucial for speech and language—declarative learning, which involves knowledge learned consciously, and procedural learning, which involves knowledge learned by experiencing something enough times for it to become habit.

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The scientists had mice run through a maze to get a reward of chocolate milk. The animals could figure out the location of the reward either through sensory cues such as rough or smooth floors, which corresponds to declarative learning. Or, they could discover the reward was always linked to either a left or right turn, which corresponds to procedural learning.

Declarative learning involves circuits in the central part of the striatum region of the brain, while procedural learning involves circuits in more peripheral parts of the striatum. The scientists found that both sets of circuits were altered in the mice with the human form of FOXP2.

Prior studies found that mice with the human version of FOXP2 demonstrate profound changes in the chemistry and anatomy of brain circuits essential for acquiring habits and other physical and mental behaviors, such as songbirds learning song. The kinds of changes seen in these studies may once have helped the human brain evolve speech and language.

"I don't think the goal is to make smarter animals, but rather to dissect out the biology underlying smartness," Smith says. "Having said that, if we can find a procedure like this that would help treat neurological or psychiatric disorders, that would be a wonderful purpose. For example, Parkinson's disease involves the same brain circuits being studied in this article — perhaps genes could be tweaked in similar ways to help."

This study "provides new ways to think about the evolution of Foxp2 function in the brain," says Genevieve Konopka, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who was not involved in the research. "It suggests that human Foxp2 facilitates learning that has been conducive for the emergence of speech and language in humans. The observed differences in dopamine levels and long-term depression in a region-specific manner are also striking and begin to provide mechanistic details of how the molecular evolution of one gene might lead to alterations in behavior."


SOURCE  MIT

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 Animal Intelligence  

Elephants are large, mysterious animals that we are only just now beginning to understand. New research has pointed out that some intelligence tests of the past did not show just how smart these animals are, and has led to calls for stopping the ivory trade, ending the confinement of elephants in zoos and even to extend them greater rights.

People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully cataloged astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades.

In the past decade, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving.

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Recent experiments designed with the elephant’s perspective in mind, have given scientists solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a sense of self.

Despite the growing awareness of elephant sentience, many zoos around the world continue to maintain or expand their elephant exhibits and increasing numbers of heavily armed poachers are descending on Africa to meet the soaring demand for ivory, sadly killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year.

Now more and more, zoos are using the latest science to transform their elephant enclosures, giving the animals more room to roam as well as intellectually stimulating puzzles. Only some zoos can afford to make such changes, however, and many elephant experts maintain that, given everything we know about the creatures’ mental lives, continuing to keep any of them locked up is inexcusable.

Image Source - http://www.wildliferesearch.co.uk/Wildlife_Research/Elephants.html

Ed Stewart, president and co-founder of Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), thinks that even his massive haven is not adequate to keep the elephants as healthy as they would be in the wild. "Elephants should not be in captivity— period," he says. "It doesn’t matter if it’s a zoo, a circus or a sanctuary. The social structure isn't correct, the space is not right, the climate is not right, the food is not right. You can never do enough to match the wild. They are unbelievably intelligent. With all of that brainpower—to be as limited as they are in captivity—it's a wonder they cope at all. In 20 years I hope we will look back and think, 'Can you believe we ever kept those animals in cages?'

The Rights of Non-Human Persons program is also working to extend the protection of 'human rights' from our species to elephants and other creatures like great apes, dolphins and whales, and parrots.

The modern elephant mind emerged from an evolutionary history that has much in common with our own. The African bush and forest elephants, the Asian elephant, and their extinct relatives, the mammoths, all began to assume their recognizable forms between three and five million years ago in Africa. As Louis Irwin of The University of Texas at El Paso explains, both humans and elephants adapted themselves to life in Africa's forests and savannas around the same time, emigrating to Europe and Asia; both evolved to live long and often migratory lives in highly complex societies; both developed intricate systems of communication; and both experienced a dramatic increase in brain size.

Researchers publishing in Current Biology have found that a group of African elephants living in captivity in Zimbabwe seem to be able to understand pointing naturally, showing an impressive ability to choose a bucket with food in it as opposed to an empty one when a human is pointing toward the chow. Moreover, the animals did not have to be trained by the researchers to perform the task. They picked the right bucket with the same frequency regardless of how many chances they’d had to practice the test.

Moreover, the elephant ability to manipulate their environment with their dexterous trunks makes them a close analog to humans with our hands.  Such a combination of brains and volitional tools has been considered essential for advanced intelligence and is spurring on developments in artificial intelligence as well.

Graeme Shannon of the University of Sussex, has described how elephants in Kenya are able to distinguish between different languages – English, the language of tourists clicking cameras and Maa, the language of the Maasai warriors who occasionally kill elephants; and Swahili, generally safe. The elephants seemed anxious when someone spoke Maa; the moment she switched to Swahili, they became calm.

Animal psychologist Karen McComb, also from Sussex University, played back elephant sounds – the deep, gargling rumble they make – to discover how many individual voices one animal could recognize. She found they could distinguish more than 100. Research in Japan suggests they can count, too.

The Oregon Zoo in Portland is close to remodeling its elephant habitat in a way it claims will improve the livelihood of its four male and four female Asian elephants. Elephant Lands, set to open in 2015, is a hilly 2.5-hectare habitat covered mostly in deep sand rather than concrete and featuring a 490,000-liter pool for wallowing, bathing and playing.

Elephants will be free to roam from one part of the terrain to another which should hopefully allow males and females to interact as they choose. Various feeding machines will provide elephants with food at random intervals, because studies have linked such unpredictability to healthier body weights. Other feeders will exercise the elephants’ trunks and brains with out-of-reach snacks and mechanical puzzles.

However it is the empathy of elephants that stands out, that makes them seem so close to humans.

As George Orwell wrote in his essay, Shooting An Elephant, "I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him."






SOURCE  Scientific American

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 Intelligence  

For the first time, scientists at King's College London have identified a gene linking the thickness of the grey matter in the brain to intelligence. The study is published today in Molecular Psychiatry and may help scientists understand biological mechanisms behind some forms of intellectual impairment.

For the first time, scientists at King's College London have identified a gene linking the thickness of the grey matter in the brain to intelligence. The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry and may help scientists understand biological mechanisms behind some forms of intellectual impairment.

The researchers looked at the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the human brain. It is known as 'grey matter' and plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness. Previous studies have shown that the thickness of the cerebral cortex, or 'cortical thickness', closely correlates with intellectual ability, however no genes had yet been identified.

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An international team of scientists, analysed DNA samples and MRI scans from 1,583 healthy 14 year old teenagers, part of the IMAGEN cohort. The teenagers also underwent a series of tests to determine their verbal and non-verbal intelligence.

Dr Sylvane Desrivières, from the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre and lead author of the study, said: "We wanted to find out how structural differences in the brain relate to differences in intellectual ability. The genetic variation we identified is linked to synaptic plasticity – how neurons communicate. This may help us understand what happens at a neuronal level in certain forms of intellectual impairments, where the ability of the neurons to communicate effectively is somehow compromised."

She adds: "It's important to point out that intelligence is influenced by many genetic and environmental factors. The gene we identified only explains a tiny proportion of the differences in intellectual ability, so it's by no means a 'gene for intelligence'."

The researchers looked at over 54,000 genetic variants possibly involved in brain development. They found that, on average, teenagers carrying a particular gene variant had a thinner cortex in the left cerebral hemisphere, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes, and performed less well on tests for intellectual ability. The genetic variation affects the expression of the NPTN gene, which encodes a protein acting at neuronal synapses and therefore affects how brain cells communicate.

To confirm their findings, the researchers studied the NPTN gene in mouse and human brain cells. The researchers found that the NPTN gene had a different activity in the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which may cause the left hemisphere to be more sensitive to the effects of NPTN mutations. Their findings suggest that some differences in intellectual abilities can result from the decreased function of the NPTN gene in particular regions of the left brain hemisphere.

The genetic variation identified in this study only accounts for an estimated 0.5% of the total variation in intelligence. However, the findings may have important implications for the understanding of biological mechanisms underlying several psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, where impaired cognitive ability is a key feature of the disorder.



SOURCE  King's College London

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Much as been made lately of the hype currently surrounding artificial intelligence.  Does the current state of the field warrant such a reaction?

A rtficial intelligence research is making great strides. Once again, the promise of the technology has been reflected in popular media, from the new movie Her, and the upcoming Transcendence to television programs like Intelligence and Almost Human.  The impressiveness of voice-recognition systems like Siri and Google Now are getting us closer to full Turing-capable machine conversations.

Despite progress, critics do point out that we are nowhere close to human-levels in terms of general intelligence metrics.

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Gary Marcus, psychology professor and artificial intelligence writer for the New Yorker, has repeatedly pointed out that artificial intelligence is now much over-hyped.

"Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for."

Also, Tom Chatfiled, writing for the Guardian recently critiqued how machine learning systems working with Big Data sets have not been very effective so far at image recognition.  He cites Google's work last summer in identifying cats from YouTube videos.

According to Chatfield, "the banality of phrases like "big data" tends to conceal a semantic switcheroo, in which the results a system generates are considered an impartial representation of the world – or worse, an appealingly predictable substitute for mere actuality."

"A certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level," he writes.

What Chatfield does not acknowledge is that artificial intelligence, and the sub-developments that make it up are exponential in nature.  The developments we are seeing now, are bound to be dismissed and highly erroneous or very discrete operations.  Common sense does elude our machines, just as a thorough understanding of it eludes us.

With continued and accelerated research and investment into neuroscience, psychology and machine learning, our artificial intelligence systems will continue to evolve and progress.  Where exactly we are on the curve towards human-level AI will not be known until we can look back at the historical development of it alongside a functioning intelligent system.

Overall, Marcus is right.  It is "useful to remember a basic truth: the human brain is the most complicated organ in the known universe, and we still have almost no idea how it works. Who said that copying its awesome power was going to be easy?"

So does the present state of the field warrant the hype?

With the promise and peril of artificial general intelligence for every person on earth, it certainly does.


SOURCE  Top Image - Iowa State University

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 Intelligence  

The Flynn effect is the substantial increase in average scores on intelligence tests all over the world over the last century. In a recent TED Talk, the discoverer of the effect, James Flynn talks about how changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

The Flynn effect — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In a fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

IQ tests are updated periodically. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), originally developed in 1949, was updated in 1974 and 1991. The revised versions are standardized to 100 using new standardization samples.

In ordinary use IQ tests are scored with respect to those standardization samples. The only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a separate study in which the same subjects take both versions. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time.

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The average rate of increase seems to be about three IQ points per decade in the US on tests such as the WISC. The increasing raw scores appear on every major test, in every age range and in every modern industrialized country although not necessarily at the same rate as in the US using the WISC.

The increase has been continuous and roughly linear from the earliest days of testing to the present. Though the effect is most associated with IQ increases, a similar effect has been found with increases of semantic and episodic memory.

Flynn is a  New Zealand-based researcher who discovered the effect of intelligence changes, believes that environmental factors play a greater role in intelligence than genetics does.

His latest findings, discussed in his 2012 book Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, also suggest that women are not only as intelligent as men, but superior when it comes to executive function. “Women, when exposed to modernity, do equal men for IQ,” Flynn said to TV ONE’s Greg Boyed. “But in the formal educational setting where they apply their intelligence, they’re outperforming men all hollow.”

Flynn, a retired university professor, has written extensively about the connection between ongoing equality and IQ gains, democracy and human rights. He also wrote a compelling book about books, The Torchlight List, in which he lists 200 must-reads.

Flynn also has researched how to improve intelligence. Each day our minds experience a deluge of conversation, lectures, newspapers, TV, the Internet, and more. But what should we really be paying attention to? Flynn poses the most challenging question of all: Who is to be the master of all this information – you or the modern world? It is you, he claims, who must be the gatekeeper that filters out what is worth remembering. Otherwise you may find yourself at the mercy of a life that you can only manage day by day.

His book, How To Improve Your Mind offers great insights into how to become an information master in the age of information overload.


SOURCE  TED

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