A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

https://www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-can-pass-a-cognitive-test-designed-for-children

by daegloe • 5 years ago

209 100 5 years ago

sciencealert.com

hour_glass• 5 years ago

Uh oh the humans are on to us

d--b• 5 years ago

Let's just complain about how click-baity the title is. It works every time.

motohagiography2• 5 years ago

As someone who trained my dog to sit and wait for me outside a shop while I got coffee, which was a similar delayed gratification and I didn't even use treats, I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.

bryanrasmussen4• 5 years ago

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/7/8360143/dogs-intelligence-scien...

On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's.

luplex2• 5 years ago

As a human researcher, I don't think that's a fair comparison. A 2.5-year-old human can talk in simple sentences. The experiments in that article don't really measure intelligence. Babies are just much more curious.

I think dogs are still surprisingly smart.

f154hfds• 5 years ago

I have a 2.5 year old.

A few weeks ago she (on her own) decided to dry her wet painting by taping it to the heat vent. We have never used tape in any way similar to that, and certainly have never used the heat vent to dry anything (it being a long-term safety hazard, and potentially bad for the ventilation system).

She routinely falls on her face because of getting herself into ridiculous precarious situations (in disturbingly similar ways).

The problem is intelligence just isn't 1D no matter how much we wish it was. Delayed gratification, problem solving and communication ability are not necessarily highly correlated enough for a single metric to make sense of the three.

everdrive• 5 years ago

It's been verified:

https://vaviper.blogspot.com/2019/06/from-onion-study-reveal...

goodcanadian• 5 years ago

From the article:

Some primates can delay gratification, along with dogs, albeit inconsistently. Corvids, too, have passed the marshmallow test.

Having had a couple of human children, I would definitely not claim that they are anything but extremely clever, but then so are many primates, dogs, and corvids.

emilecantin• 5 years ago

Yes. Children are literally little humans. They have enormous brainpower, they just lack the experience they need to use it properly.

ruffrey• 5 years ago

Perhaps. Small children are also exceptionally accident prone.

On the other hand, human children are incredibly curious and experiment with everything. It may not be stupidity that keeps them from following directions.

TrispusAttucks• 5 years ago

Indeed!

There is much to be learned by occasionally breaking the rules.

jancsika• 5 years ago

To properly test, you'd need to:

1. Draw a triangle on your forehead

2. Make a shitty clone of yourself with a circle drawn on the clone's forehead, who comes out of the shop immediately after you walk in

Then see if your dog decides to follow the shitty clone, or whether it waits a couple minutes for the regular version of you.

Edit: also, repeat with many more dogs, many more dog owners, and many more shitty clones.

unstatusthequo• 5 years ago

This made me laugh as a potential Rick & Morty episode

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

I mean, the dog gets nothing for sitting and waiting. He stopped getting treats once training was over. So is he smarter than the kid that wonders off or comes inside demanding cake and acting cute?

Grustaf• 5 years ago

That’s not delayed gratification, it’s just obeying orders. In the marshmallow test it’s crucial that the subject makes their choice freely.

numpad0• 5 years ago

I think we’re all too ignorant about potentially including/integrating other animals into the society, Doctor Dolittle style. Wouldn’t it be just fantastic?

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.

Human children are stupid by design (well, evolution). Language, culture, and technology are overtaking genetics as the more effective information transfer mechanism. As we shed our instincts to make room for learning, human children will be born more and more stupid over time. It's a trade-off: At the same time, human adults will have greater capacity for smarts. It is the increasing stupidity at birth which enables us to learn so much into adulthood.

Animals without developed language haven't been able to afford this progress. They are smarter than human children from birth, but are unable to learn as much. So while your dog outperforms a human child at waiting outside the store, it will never have the capacity for art, mathematics, nor engineering, no matter how hard you train it. Humans on the other hand, can be trained quite a bit.

slavik81• 5 years ago

Obedience and intelligence are different things.

bryanrasmussen4• 5 years ago

I mean the signature characteristic of the most famous Cephalopod in fiction is that it waits dreaming in its house in R'lyeh. Evidently not coming out until the food on offer is better, either.

amarant• 5 years ago

You sure? I seem to recall some kind of mass hysteria happening fairly recently, made it was the first signs of his coming

HenryBemis• 5 years ago

"They break camouflage when they forage, so they are exposed to every predator in the ocean that wants to eat them. We speculate that delayed gratification may have evolved as a byproduct of this, so the cuttlefish can optimise foraging by waiting to choose better quality food."

It's a bit of natural selection. I don't know if cephalopods have a 'patience' gene. If yes, then --> natural selection. The ones who didn't have this gene got eaten many generations ago. The ones who do (and their genetically blessed offsprings), are alive to 'tell the tale'.

This is a bit biased if you ask me. They examined only the ones thay they found. The ones they found are the ones that are alive. The ones that are alive are the ones that are patient.

To disqualify my above 'theory' the scientists must capture eggs of 100 (?) eggs, raise them, treat them all the same, and then release them in a controlled 'wild' environment and see how fast they get eaten/how many survive for how long.

Then they compare results with their observations in the wild.

I am not a marine biologists, so I probably wasted 30secs of your life (apologies).

JoeAltmaier3• 5 years ago

Says more about how hard it is to design tests, than it does about this particular test. Lots of reasons for delayed gratification. Not all of them mean "as smart as humans".

yboris2• 5 years ago

That's not the conclusion: no one is claiming "as smart as humans". Intelligence is multidimensional, and along some dimensions animals outperform us by a long shot.

Some birds remember thousands of locations of their stashed food. Some animals have a detailed internal map of many square miles of land on which they live. Pick just about anything a typical 3 year old can do, and we can find an animal to outperform them in that respect.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...

treetoppin• 5 years ago

Glad to see someone else referenced this book. For anyone who wants to learn more about just how difficult it is to peer into the minds of other creatures, I highly recommend this book. Also, it's filled with delightful anecdotes of animal behavior that you would only experience if you spent hundreds of hours observing an individual.

JoeAltmaier3• 5 years ago

Sure they were; that's what the title implies. Else, why the comparison?

And I'm curious if those studies of animal intelligence, actually tried a human. Could I remember thousands of place I put stuff? I think I do. I have a whole house full of stuff, and can find most of it quickly. I remember where I kept my socks in an apartment I lived in 30 years ago.

So yeah no, animals maybe aren't ahead of us in cognitive function.

hermitcrab2• 5 years ago

If anyone is interested in cephalopod intelligence I heartily recommend the book: "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

yboris2• 5 years ago

Related: I highly recommend the documentary My Octopus Teacher

https://www.netflix.com/title/81045007

hermitcrab2• 5 years ago

Yes, that is excellent as well. And quite moving.

choxi• 5 years ago

One of the most interesting concepts in the book was "efference copies." The idea is that your mind needs to distinguish between stimulus that you caused by voluntary action (moving your arm) versus stimulus that the environment causes (your arm being moved by something else), so you send these "echos" of your voluntary actions back to your brain and this is possibly where your sense of self comes from.

mindfulplay3• 5 years ago

That. And the idea that the cuttlefish are perhaps showing their internal state via their changing color patterns and not as a sinajng device. And of course their fairly short lives.

mindfulplay3• 5 years ago

I second this recommendation. I think someone in HN recommended this, very fascinating. My respect and interest for octopuses and surprisingly cuttlefish went way high up after reading this book. Kudos to whoever recommended it!

It feels like we are wasting our time looking for aliens searching for them in the skies (especially the unscientific work around oumuamua).

They are living right beside us in the form of cephalopods. We haven't deployed enough science on these amazing creatures yet (without of course distributing them like putting them in cages), probably because it's not a sexy field as compared to say astronomy or other cool things...

koalahedron4• 5 years ago

Thanks all, for these references! My wife is into cephalopod intelligence. I'll forward this to her and ask if she has any other recommendations.

I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts:

https://zapatopi.net/cephnews/ https://tonmo.com/

koalahedron4• 5 years ago

My wife sent me these that she has read and recommends:

Textbooks:

Cephalopod Cognition by Anne-Sophie Darmaillacq (Editor), Ludovic Dickel (Editor), Jennifer Mather (Editor)

Cephalopod Behaviour 2nd Edition by Roger T. Hanlon (Author), John B. Messenger (Author)

Personal anecdotes:

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness Paperback by Sy Montgomery

8fGTBjZxBcHq• 5 years ago

The article doesn't mention this but that test is not very well regarded currently. It's basically a test of food security and trust in adults rather than any particular behavioral benchmark.

mr-wendel• 5 years ago

I think it's even worse than that. I hate this test because both now and as a kid I'd take the single marshmallow and just be done. I don't want two, even if you hand them to me back-to-back... let alone 15 minutes later.

I don't care if its my favorite treat either. I believed quite strongly that a little vs a lot doesn't matter: the best parts are in the anticipation, the initial bite, and enjoying the lingering aftertaste. Having more more bites to eat is a gimmick with nothing but downsides (however now I get how things like addiction can drastically alter that equation so the "more" is practically everything).

So show me a version of this test that doesn't have the assumption "all kids are greedy for food and the most successful ones will optimize for that" at its core.

tiagod• 5 years ago

The cuttlefish test was very different though. Instead of more food, it's about better food.

mindfulplay3• 5 years ago

I agree but this new adapted test for cuttlefish is actually pretty smart. They actually zone in on delayed gratification.

mzs• 5 years ago

There's more to the paper, though only six cuttlefish:

The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning. They were shown two different visual cues, a grey square and a white one. When they approached one, the other would be removed from the tank; if they made the "correct" choice, they would be rewarded with a snack.
Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue. Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.

https://rs.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_set_raw_traini...

markhahn• 5 years ago

It is a test, and it is used on humans. It isn't a qualification for human-ness, any more than "breathing" is.

Theory of Mind is much more a test of human-ness - a stage person-ness really. And yes, quite a few animals qualify.

40four2• 5 years ago

I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of ”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence”.

I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.

Cephalopods have proven to to be incredibly intelligent, and emotional. I think you could easily argue many of them are smarter than human children, maybe even a lot of adults :)

I highly recommend an episode of ‘Nature’ I saw recently on PBS about octopi. It’s called “Octopus: Making Contact”. It’s the story of a professor who decided to install a tank and keep an octopus in his home, and the relationship he & his daughter developed with it. Absolutely stunning!

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making-contact-previ...

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/baby-cephalopods-first-momen...

steve_adams_864• 5 years ago

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish.

I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony. It has been a difficult revelation in some ways. Cooking meat has almost been a part of my way of life; it’s something I took pride in and always did to the best of my ability. Now I don’t really have much interest in food at all.

Jeff_Brown2• 5 years ago

It's a very hard realization to have. I applaud you. I was vegan for a couple years, until I devleped tooth problems for the first time in my life, which spooked me and I quit. Now I just try to moderate my meat intake, consume the less-in-demand parts like tongue (nobody raises a cow for its tongue), and buy from sources that impose less, albeit clearly still substantial, suffering.

But that said, there's so much great vegetarian food to be eaten!

liuxiansheng2• 5 years ago

The realization that animals in factory farms have a capacity to suffer, and are undoubtedly subjected to this suffering for the majority of their lives, has made me cut my meat consumption from every meal to occasionally on the weekends. Would love to cut it out completely but have not mustered the willpower to do so.

I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding to stimuli has helped me with that realization.

eadmund• 5 years ago

I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony.

I don't think that cephalopods are arrogant when they eat other creatures, although I suppose they may be gluttonous. Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?

michael19992• 5 years ago

With apologies to Sinclair: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his dinner plate depends on his not understanding it.

Cooking is a source of pleasure and society. My cultural Christian inheritance (and yours?) is quite committed to the separateness of people and animals. Many people deny even the wholeness of the human species. Where is the mystery in your beliefs? It is only an inheritance you now reject.

You can come back to meat later, or not, in your own time. Sort of like when you go far enough left, you get your guns back. There is nothing shameful in a cat.

_y5hn• 5 years ago

Most of it is learned behaviour. There is nothing natural about it for children, but conditioning and culture largely makes us who we are as humans.

So I don't see the need to look down on yourself for realizing something new. It wouldn't be new if it was totally familiar. However, the knowledge itself is thousands of years old, and also evolving.

macintux• 5 years ago

Every time I read about octopi I'm stunned at their intelligence and ability to connect with humans.

If our civilization lasts long enough, someday we'll all be reviled for eating animals, especially octopi and pigs.

RamRodification4• 5 years ago

How come you include pigs but leave out cows?

koalahedron4• 5 years ago

Taken further, you might argue that there might be condemnation eventually of the whole concept of pets and work animals too. I'm not sure I "condemn" these ideas, but I don't have a pet because I think animals should be wild. I make my own ethical comprimises, though, don't get me wrong.

Harry Harrison wrote a book I read many years ago called West of Eden, where the dinosaur extinction event didn't occur. An advanced species of lizard used modified lifeforms for their tech. I have it on my list to read again. It does make you think people might be more symbiotic towards the world rather than what we have now.

throwanem• 5 years ago

I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case.

The naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, in the 19th century, made an extensive study of solitary, spider-hunting wasps. Much of what he discovered, with regard to the surprising complexity of their hunting and nesting behavior, became well known in his day - he was one of the first writers I discovered when I started delving into the literature to feed my own burgeoning interest in the aculeates, and one of the reasons his work is so easy to come by is that it was popular, and thus well preserved.

It was very much new to me, though; to whatever extent it had entered common knowledge a century and a half ago, it has since exited again. If anything, I think that in recent generations we have become less likely to recognize complex behavior and intelligence in nonhuman animals, not more so; that may be changing, but if so, I think it must have begun quite recently.

317070• 5 years ago

There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

Park Ranger at Yosemite National Park (on designing secure garbage cans)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...

lostlogin2• 5 years ago

I was talking to a kitchen hand in New Zealand in an area with Kea. He described the escalating battle to keep kea out the rubbish bins. It started with a rock on the lid which they solved fast, and then various other hinderances to keep them out.

The kea sit and watch and learn over s day or 3 and then they are back in, causing chaos.

The kitchen staff were trying to solve each puzzle with time pressure, a job to do and bad weather. The kea looked to find it funny whole the poor worker was frustrated.

dunefox• 5 years ago

I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.

Well, it is objectively inferior. That doesn't mean that it's not intelligence.

40four2• 5 years ago

Haha, ok in general you’re right. Maybe a poor choice of words. But also, in general, I believe we have vastly underestimated the intelligence of most other animals. Even ones that are demonstrably not that smart.

lurquer3• 5 years ago

I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.

Great post. Respectfully, though, I disagree with the excerpt above.

I find that urbanization has led to a disconnect between people and animals. In times past, a person would have regular contact with a host of domesticated animals (cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, goat, chickens, pigs, etc.) as well as the wild animals that are a part of everyday life in rural settings (rodents, possums, armadillos, foxes, coyotes, snakes, deer, birds, etc.)

Without question, people in the past had a far greater appreciation of the ‘intelligence’ and behavior of animals than modern city-dwellers.

One need look no further than the numerous metaphors that have been passed down from these non-urban times: stubborn as a mule, wise as serpents, cunning like a fox, horse-sense, wise as an owl, etc...

In short, I’d suggest that the more modern (or, perhaps, urbanized is a better word) the LESS appreciation one finds for animal intelligence.

RikNieu2• 5 years ago

I have family who still live a pretty rural life, close to nature. They care very little about animals compared to my urban friends and family. They view animals as little more than "moving things" or simply food.

ldng• 5 years ago

One need look no further than the numerous metaphors that have been passed down from these non-urban times: stubborn as a mule, wise as serpents, cunning like a fox, horse-sense, wise as an owl, etc...

Are you sure that comes from nature observation ?

Satire used to criticize the powerful of the world picturing them as animals. So these associations might not come from where you think they do. La Fontaine's fables are a good example of that. He was not the only one to do that.

Jeff_Brown2• 5 years ago

That seems like cuttlefish can exert self control, all right, but what's not clear is why. In species such as parrots, primates, and corvids, delayed gratification has been linked to factors such as tool use (because it requires planning ahead), food caching (for obvious reasons) and social competence (because prosocial behaviour - such as making sure everyone has food - benefits social species). > Cuttlefish, as far as we know, don't use tools or cache food, nor are they especially social ...

This feels like an evolutionary attribution error, if that's a thing. Self control is different from a thumb; there aren't necessarily any genes that code for it.

My first guess would be that, in order for a creature to be as smart as a cuttlefish, it needs to have a mental model of spacetime and of itself. Self-control is just one of the many results of such intelligence.

glsdfgkjsklfj• 5 years ago

*a biased cognitive test

carapace• 5 years ago

There are implications of certain recent discoveries. Not to be mysterious, I'm talking about Levin's lab.[1] All cells "think" using the same bio-molecular machinery as neurons. Neurons are just denser and faster.

-> Intelligence is ambient.

All cells think, and all collections of cells (from biofilms and stomatolites on up) think. In computer terms all cells use compatible protocols and processors and the living world is a kind of biological internet ("Wood-Wide Web").

-> All life shares one mind.

Whatever mind is, if you believe it "runs on" the physical substrate of cellular internet, then our minds are not separate from the minds of other living things. This would explain a lot.

When I bring this up people often object that this is anthropomorphism, but don't see it that way. Since all living tissue is intelligent, I see humans as the anthropomorphism of that ambient intelligence of the biosphere.

-> The biosphere is the result of "intelligent design": it's own.

From early on, the evolution of life would have become (more deeply) self-referential through mental feedback, meaning that the advent of intelligence itself becomes a factor in the further evolution of life. Things like the great switch-over from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism and the concomitant massive increase in atmospheric oxygen may well have been deliberate choice on the part of the global mind. In any event, the reductive mechanistic view of "dumb" life is faulty. Earth is Solaris.

Now this changes nothing about evolution. It's still a chemical tautology with no purpose, and adaptive pressure doesn't stop just because cells can think. ("Science does not remove the terror of the gods.") The Earth as a single being still has to navigate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Gaia is mortal. Part of the reason living systems seem so wildly inefficient (an illusion) is that they are so inconceivably resilient. (Efficiency vs. inefficiency is meaningless in evolution: there is no purpose so there can be no measurement of efficiency.)

[1] "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

Related Stories