For years, dog and cat owners have been arguing over the IQ of their furry friends. Last time I checked, dogs were declared the winners of this endless debate.
But be careful, this discovery does not guarantee that your dog will graduate from HEC and pay half the rent. Especially since Zazie Todd, psychologist and specialist in canine and feline behavior, reveals a new way of classifying our favorite animals in the BBC Science Focus Magazine.
Dogs typically have larger brains (depending on breed) and more neurons. A golden retriever was once analyzed with 623 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, compared to 429 million for a small dog and 250 million for a cat. That said, these animals are very different in many ways, so much so that it’s hard to actually compare them directly. This time, science has come down to three key types of intelligence. Here they are.
Social intelligence
One way to measure social cognition is the unsolvable task paradigm. The test is simple: Once a dog has learned to get food out of a container, the container is closed so that the food is inaccessible. Faced with this puzzle, dogs turn to their owners for help. There are fewer studies of this type on cats, but in a similar experiment, both dogs and cats were able to find a hidden piece of food when a person pointed to it. Unlike dogs, most cats did not ask for help. However, cats are very observant and can tell whether a person is paying attention to them or not (something dogs can do as well).
The ability to count
To test quantitative discrimination, scientists propose…
- Slate.fr
