Photograph: U.S. National Park Service
Big brain
Any biologist can tell you that bears are among the smartest land animals on Planet Earth. Their brain is the biggest of al land carnivores (although in real life most wild bears are omnivores and generally don’t eat large quantities of meat that often). Besides that, bears have shown to posses above average learning capabilities. A remarkable new study published in the journal Animal Behavior even documents how black bears have demonstrated an ability to recognize different quantities of things.
Touch screen
To learn more about the mental capabilities of bears, Jennifer Vonk, an assistant professor in Psychology at Oakland University, and her team devised an experiment involving three captive North American black bears being trained how to use a simple touch screen computer. After the bears were familiarized with the technology, they were presented with two sets of dots, or what the paper refers to as “arrays.” The researchers wanted to see if the bears were capable of of recognizing and choosing between more and less dots in the arrays. The bears touched the screen to select one or other of the arrays, and were rewarded with food when they got a right answer. Two of the bears were rewarded for distinguishing an array with fewer dots, and one bear was rewarded for distinguishing an array with more dots. Due to the fact that researchers wanted to ensure that the bears were not just estimating magnitude, or the dots relative to the area in which the dots were housed, which is a skill that a lot of animals have demonstrated in the past, they concentrated on having the bears show they could actually quantify, which is a separate and much more difficult skill to acquire. However, one small note of caution: the paper on these findings notes that saying the bears can ‘count’ might be stretching the import of the study a little: quantity estimation is the preferred term because to establish that the bears are actually able to delineate the number of things they are presented with — rather than just identifying ‘more or less’ — would require several different tests.
Bron: Care2.com
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