Lecture notes
Biological Basis of Behaviour Notes
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- University Of Exeter (UoEX)
Complete set of notes for Biological Basis of Behaviour module - 2nd year psychology students on a BSP accredited course.
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Biological Basis of behaviour- week 5Week 5- Lecture 10.1 and 10.2
Tests of Intelligence
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on
the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because
he’s achieved so much: the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever
done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins believed
that they were more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the
dolphins had long known of the impending demolition of Earth, and had made many attempts
to alert mankind to the danger. But most of their communications were misinterpreted as
amusing attempts to punch footballs, or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left
the Earth by their own means - shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin
message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards
somersault through a hoop, whilst whistling the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. But, in fact, the
message was this: “So long, and thanks for all the fish”. In fact, there was only one species on
the planet more intelligent than dolphins and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural
research laboratories running round inside wheels, and conducting frighteningly elegant and
subtle experiments on man.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, BBC Radio 4 22nd March, 1978
Today’s questions:
• Do studies of animal cognition enable us to say which species of animals are most
intelligent?
• If so, how do we do it, and what is the answer?
• In this presentation I focus on the tests most often used in this context.
Behavioural Correlates of intelligence
• Typical suggestion: learning rate – with a fixed task, animals that learn faster must be
more intelligent - but contextual variables are an issue.
• Commonly used example: Hebb-Williams maze (sequence of T-mazes)
, • More sophisticated example: not one task but “learning how to learn”
– Successive reversal
– Learning set
– Probability learning
• Better, a battery of tests, looking for patterns (Bitterman, 1965), more like the approach
to IQ.
Examples: Serial Reversal Learning: Mackintosh (1974)
This is based on the idea is that the more intelligent an animal, the faster it will catch on to the
correct strategy to employ here – even supposing that it can! The trouble with this is that it
really seems to depend on the type of task used
Procedure:
1. Learn this problem to a criterion of 90%
2. Then it reverses and the animal has to learn this new problem to a 90% criterion
3. It then reverses again and they have to learn new problem to 90% criterion again
Result:
On later reversals the animal makes less errors in acquiring the discrimination. Rate at which
this occurs correlated with intelligence?
Work recently done at Madingley in Cambridge showed that sheep (not noted for being the
brightest animal) could be really good at this. Using a T-maze polytunnel, the sheep had to
learn whether to go Right or Left, the two stimuli were this spatial position. They would learn
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, this, and, over a series of reversals, got much faster. Does this really indicate that they are
highly intelligent? Or have we just found a version of this test which particularly suits them?
Examples: Learning Sets – Halow (1949)
Procedure:
1. Learn this problem to a criterion of say 90% correct.
2. Then it changes and the animal has to learn to the same criterion again
3. Then it changes again and they must learn to a 90% crietion again
Result:
On later problems the animal makes less errors in acquiring the discrimination. In extreme
cases it makes only 1 error! Can we use the rate of acquisition of this problem as an index
of intelligence?
Learning sets across species
This graph might suggest that we can use the rate of
acquisition of this problem as an index of intelligence.
Higher scores are better, and progress is shown across
problems. The monkeys are doing better than the cats,
and they are doing better than the rats and squirrels,
which fits in with some other data on intelligence and is
not at odds with our intuitions.
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