A Chicken's a Little Bit Smarter Than a Human According to a study published in the journal Animal Cognition, chickens can solve a simple version of the “Triangle” puzzle, in which they are trained to pick up a treat from inside of a triangle-shaped maze, then transfer it to a square-shaped maze. When researchers compare the results to a control group of chimpanzees, they find that the chickens were actually more successful at this task. Humans aren’t much better at solving this problem than chickens either; they need an average of 3 seconds more to complete the task than chickens. In another experiment, the chickens are tasked with picking up two food sources in two separate areas and transporting them to a single drop-off area. When compared to the chimpanzees, chickens were much more successful at using their own innate mental models to correctly solve the problem. When the researchers took a closer look at the chicken’s mental maps, they realized that they use a similar system to “mental mapping” to humans. This cognitive process involves creating mental maps to navigate the world, which is why we often get lost while navigating. In this experiment, chickens are observed creating mental maps of the maze, something that only humans can do. They are also observed pecking at the corners of the mazes as they search for a clue as to where the food is located. A Dog in Court? It turns out that dogs do better on an IQ test than cats, too. In a study published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, researchers find that some dogs do better than others at solving tasks like finding a hidden target, which tests their search skills. Cats, on the other hand, use their sense of smell when solving puzzles like these, which is why they out-score dogs when it comes to finding food. They are also better at figuring out how to manipulate a human hand to get a treat; a skill usually associated with higher intelligence. For example, if a cat sees a human put a treat in their pocket, they will use their sense of smell to find the hand with the treat in it. When it comes to using tools, cats are also often able to find the right tool for the job. It turns out that cats are smarter than dogs, but even smart dogs aren’t as smart as the humans who own them. It appears that cats and dogs have the same level of intelligence as a child — and we should feel lucky if we get the same results out of our pets as our kids. Dogs and cats, at least, are more likely to be around longer than kids or human adults. Who knows, one day they might even pass the turing test too. Kaspar Brand is a research scientist for The Good Men Project. He previously worked as an intelligence analyst for the NSA. Correction: This article has been amended to correct a previous mis-statement that chimpanzees can't make abstract tools or solve simple puzzles; this has been changed to reflect the fact that chimpanzees do not make "true" tools, and can only make simple tool use behaviors such as a raking or a pinching tool. Like this article?SIGN UP for our newsletter About David Gornoski David Gornoski is a science journalist and book author based in Seattle. He is a co-author of The New York Times best-seller Viral Loop: Tracking the Outbreaks That Threaten Us All. He is currently working on a book about zombies and a non-fiction sequel to Mermaids: The Body Found. Follow him on Twitter @davidagornoski. We Recommend I wish that the writer was slightly more precise with his description of intelligence, i.e., the article says “a higher order of reasoning” not exactly intelligence, and as such is misleading. Also it would be a lot better to describe animals as possessing reasoning ability or cognitive intelligence; which they indeed do have, although not the same kind of reasoning like humans and their higher mental functions, in comparison to that of lower life forms (e.g. insects) which also do have some reasoning ability of their own. To draw a parallel, just think about a dog or cat knowing where the food dish is located in the house or the human who made it for them. These lower living forms understand their environment, they have their own thinking as well as reasoning ability, in a way similar to humans and other primates. For any human to understand how an animal (dog, or a monkey) works it requires some effort and a basic understanding of the evolutionary processes at play for survival among living creatures. What about dogs and cats actually DOING anything "higher" is beyond me. "Intelligence" is the ability to react to a stimulus. Dogs and cats have the same reaction when they see a cat on TV or when they walk into a cat food commercial. They react the same when a cat is a bad guy in a movie or when a child says, "Oh look - a kitty cat!" Now if you want a scientific definition of intelligence, a simple one is, "The ability to think about things." Animals cannot "think about things." What they do think about is the next meal and that's why they do not have intelligence. Dogs are more intelligent than cats? I don't know about the case of cats but we used to say that the cat is more stupid than a dog because: how else they reproduce than the cat has only one litter a year to keep the population in balance against the predators.