Abstract
After re-reading Macphail’s (1987) essay “The Comparative Psychology of Intelligence” with all the associated commentaries, I was struck by how contemporary many of the arguments and counter-arguments still appear. Of course, we now know much more about the abilities of many more species (including their neurobiology) and fewer researchers currently favor explanations of behavior based solely on associative processes; however, the role of contextual variables in comparative psychology still remains cloudy. I discuss these issues briefly. Given my research interests involving the cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey parrots, the one aspect of the original article upon which I feel I can comment in depth involves Macphail’s claims about the importance of language—and specifically syntax—in problem-solving and thus in placing humans above all other creatures. Granted, no other species has (or in my opinion is likely ever to acquire) everything that goes into what is considered “human language.” Nevertheless, several other species have acquired symbolic representation, and considerable information now exists upon which to base an argument that such acquisition by itself enables more complex and “human-like” cognitive processes. Such processes may form the basis of the kind of intelligence that is measured—not surprisingly—with human-based tasks, including the use of such representations as a means to directly query non-human subjects in ways not unlike those used with young children.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Comparative Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 31 January 2020 Accepted: 20 April 2020 Published: 19 May 2020Citation: Pepperberg IM (2020) TheComparative Psychology of Intelligence: Some Thirty YearsLater
With some exceptions that I will not discuss below, many of the same arguments and counter-arguments might be found in contemporary literature
Even within the same species, individual differences exist with respect to competencies: we argue about human brilliance based on outliers (e.g., Einstein, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Shakespeare), but the ‘average’ human clearly does not exhibit such capacities, even when contextual variables are taken into account
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Comparative Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. At least one reptile fails a task in simple numerical cognition ( not in distinguishing larger from smaller objects; Petrazzini et al, 2017), and comparative work by researchers (e.g., Kamil and his students; see Olson, 1991; Olson et al, 1995) have shown that some bird species excel at certain spatial learning tasks and not on others such as match-to-sample Some of these behavioral differences may be related to differences in brain structure (see previous section), but one might, like Macphail, argue that such differences are a matter of “contextual variables.”. These findings do not support Macphail’s claims of a lack of difference in intelligence among species, but rather suggest that having even some language-like elements may be instrumental in assisting researchers to explore these differences
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