Average bear could be pretty smart

[xchrom]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/343235/title/Average_bear_could_be_pretty_smart


American black bears that take computerized tests by pawing, nose-bumping or licking a touch screen may rival great apes when it comes to learning concepts.

Using three zoo bear siblings as classroom subjects, comparative cognitive psychologist Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., and her colleagues presented pairs of pictures to the bears on a rugged computer screen and gave them food treats for pawing the image from a certain category. To demonstrate learning a concept, bears had to figure out what kind of picture would earn a treat and then pick that kind of image from a new set.

One challenge, picking the portrait of a black bear instead of an image of a person, could be mastered by relying on a mix of visual clues such as furriness or snout shape. But picking out all the animals from non-animals — cars or landscapes, for example — required finding more abstract connections among pictures that didn’t look much at all alike.

At least one of the three bears showed some capacity at each of the five levels tested, Vonk and colleagues report in an upcoming Animal Behaviour.

[Odin2005]

1. *insert Yogi Bear joke*

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Smarter than humans who deliberately get too close to them, at any rate

Faster, too.

[Riftaxe]

3. Fortunately, that seems pretty much like

a self correcting problem...

[DavidDvorkin]

4. Hah!

[Care Acutely]

5. Unfortunately, not so much for the bears

Who are often executed for human stupidity.