h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How does one measure and rank animal intelligence? How much does animal intelligence vary within a species, sub-species, a breed?

You mentioned that the simians express thoughts on the level of a child, yet we do not hesitate to rank children for their intelligence, that was what Binet designed the tests for.

Many rankings of sub-standard intelligence classify people as having the intelligence of a child of a particular age. This indicates that children have limited capabilities of mentation. But IQ tests for children are said to measure 'potential' which is to say they are projective, mot measurements of actual qualities or quantities of qualities.

Barton

how do you measure non-human intelligence, good question, someday someone will come up with a good answer. the questions being asked at the moment deal with which animals are intelligent, what form does that intelligence take, and how does it correlate with the types and detail of human intelligence.

As to binet designed it to rank intelligence, that is not what he did. he designed test for a species with a particular set of variability, skills, shared knowledge, etc and a unstated assumption that the intelligence was there, and fitted the normal distribution bell curve of statistics. As for the child age being used in the measuring of IQ, I have always viewed this as a statement of the inadequesy of the current tests, and thought that when better tests come along, the age can be removed as it already has to be for adults.

Having said that, I will have to try and write up the current methodology of using the age in child testing, andtry not to be too scathing in the way I do it, but it does have quite a number of faults.

as regard animal variability within and between species, it will have to wait until better tests are created, but using things like evoked potential, and symbolic complexity measurement, and cortical area measurements, we should be able to get somewhere in the next 50-100 years so we can start asking the more important questions.

If EP measures human intelligence then shouldn't it measure animal intelligence? Obviously we would want to add here that we can use EP between humans because the complexity of our brains is essentially the same between individuals. So this is the equivalent of cheeking machinery as it comes off the assembly line to see which are better put together from the same components.

Fine, but . . . Doesn't it seem that some qualities are present in some and not in others? Such as the things tested for in special IQ.

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You know, it just occured to me what it is I really hate about IQ tests.

The problem is that they are designed to measure potential achievement abilities given a certain set of basic skills.

The word 'potential' is never fully understood by the public. In stead we see statements such as "people may take the test over and over and never significantly increase their scores." The result is that someone takes the quotient to be a solid indication of that person's inteligence. Period.

Add in the word 'potential.' Rename the stupid tests to Potential Intellgence Assesment, call the results the PIQ and most of my objections go away.

The only significant issue remaining is finding questions that don't require bias or get rid of general IQ all together and replace it with EP.
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If there are in fact fundamental differences between the capablilities of each of our human brains then there are fundamental issues with the assumptions behind touting EP at all.

However, if these differences make no difference then there is nothing wrong with using EP for humans and there is nothing wrong with using EP for animals between animals of the same species. It seems to me that ought to be the next study, using EP between animals of the same species, such as dogs.

I would be particularly interested in seeing the different measurements between 'smart' dogs of different sizes (which is to say between sub-species). Since EP measures time to response and response time is dependant on synapse speed as well as number of nerves between sensory receptor and brain response. The question of length of nerves could be resolves as well as size of brain issues.

After that it is a matter for find a way to interrelate EP scored between humans and other creatures to produce a score indicating potential intelligence.

Barton