CAMBRIDGE, England- Many Pagans are deeply familiar with animal intelligence. In some traditions, animal intelligence is a central component to understanding spiritual forces allowing them to communicate with spirits and heal illness. Shamanism is an example of one such tradition.
New research into animal intelligence expands our understanding of how animals perceive the world and their ability to solve some problems. There are well-known exemplars of intelligent animals. Orangutans, chimps, bottlenose dolphins, dogs, and crows are common examples, but octopuses, African grey parrots, elephants, and pigs are also on the list of some of the smartest animals.
Research from the University of Cambridge’s Comparative Cognition Lab published this week in the journal Current Biology provides some interesting insight into how monkeys resolve events. To explore the issue, psychologists relied on magic tricks used by performers.
It turns out that these types of performance tricks are an excellent way to deduce an animal’s intelligence. “The psychology of magic offers the scientific community a powerful methodological tool for testing the perceptive blind spots and cognitive roadblocks in diverse [species],” write a group of researchers led by Dr. Elias Garcia-Pelegrin from the University of Cambridge in an article published in 2020 in the journal Science. “Studying whether animals can be deceived by the same magic effects that deceive humans can offer a window into the cognitive parallels and variances in attention, perception, and mental time travel.”
In the current research study, psychologists including Dr. Elias Garcia-Pelegrin presented monkeys with a famous sleight-of-hand trick called the French Drop. The sleight-of-hand trick relies on the observer’s assumption about what happens to an object.
The trick involves the magician presenting an object and then covering one hand with the other The object, such as a coin, is taken by the hidden thumb of one hand making the coin appear to vanish from the view of the spectator.
When the French Drop was performed in front of monkeys with a tasty favorite little treat replacing the coin, some fell for the vanishing trick. Other monkeys, however, were more suspicious for lack of a better word.
The treats served as a reward for those monkeys that chose the correct hand. Capuchins were given peanuts, squirrel monkeys were given delicious, dried mealworms, and marmosets were offered marshmallows.
Capuchins are renowned for their dexterity and use of stone tools in the wild. They can “waggle each finger, and have opposable thumbs allowing “precision grip” between thumb and forefingers.” Squirrel monkeys have limited thumb rotations and marmosets do not have opposable thumbs.
The study found that monkeys lacking opposable thumbs did not fall for the French Drop. The monkeys that did fall for the trick had opposable thumbs in common.
Sadly, the Capuchins were fooled by the French drop and missed out on their peanut, as were the majority of squirrel monkeys who failed to get their delicious mealworms.
The majority of the marmosets got their marshmallows, however. Marmosets were rarely taken in by the magic trick, only just 6% of the time. “They simply chose the hand in which the marshmallow was initially placed, and stuck with it.”
To verify their findings the researchers tried nullifying the tricks by completing the hand-to-hand transfer of treats, instead of misdirecting the monkeys with the French Drop. With that change, the capuchins and squirrel monkeys got their peanuts and mealworms by anticipating correctly. Sadly, with the change, the marmosets missed out on their marshmallows.
A capuchin monkey is tested with a fake French drop – so the treat is actually transferred from hand to hand – as part of the experiment. Credit: Dr. Elias Garcia-Pelegrin [Courtesy]
The research suggests that sharing a biomechanical trait- in this case opposable thumbs- may be necessary to accurately anticipate the movements of those same limbs in others. “This is true even when those apparently accurate predictions end in befuddlement at the hands of an illusionist.”
“Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead the observer into experiencing the impossible. It is a great way to study blind spots in attention and perception,” said Dr Elias Garcia-Pelegrin who was the lead author in the current research and who has practiced performance magic for a decade and is now with the University of Singapore studying the development of both human and non-human intelligence.
“By investigating how species of primates experience magic, we can understand more about the evolutionary roots of cognitive shortcomings that leave us exposed to the cunning of magicians.”
“In this case, whether having the manual capability to produce an action, such as holding an item between finger and thumb, is necessary for predicting the effects of that action in others,” said Garcia-Pelegrin.
“There is increasing evidence that the same parts of the nervous system used when we perform an action are also activated when we watch that action performed by others,” said Prof Nicola Clayton FRS, senior author of the study from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
“This mirroring in our neural motor system might explain why the French drop worked for the capuchins and squirrel monkeys but not for marmosets.”
“It’s about the embodiment of knowledge,” added Clayton. “How one’s fingers and thumbs move helps to shape the way we think, and the assumptions we make about the world – as well as what others might see, remember and anticipate, based on their expectations.”
“Our work raises the intriguing possibility that an individual’s inherent physical capability heavily influences their perception, their memory of what they think they saw, and their ability to predict manual movements of those around them.”
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