Intelligence
An early behavioral study was performed in the 1960s to assess visual learning ability in minks, ferrets, skunks, and house cats. Animals were tested on their ability to recognize objects, learn their valences and make object selections from memory. Minks were found to outperform ferrets, skunks, and cats in this task, but this letter (short paper) fails to account for a possible conflation of a cognitive ability (decision making, associative learning) with a largely perceptual ability (invariant object recognition).
Read more about this topic: American Mink
Famous quotes containing the word intelligence:
“There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“... perhaps there exists only one intelligence from which the world sublets, one intelligence toward which each person, from the depths of his individual body, directs his gaze, as in the theater where, though each has a seat, however, there is only one stage.... But if it we all shared the same intelligence, [Bergotte] would, upon hearing me express [my ideas], remember them, love them, smile at them....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)