Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-09T22:26:22.140Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

29 - General Intelligence (g) in Mice

from Part VI - Innovation and Problem-Solving

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2021

By
Charles Locurto
Edited by
Allison B. Kaufman ,
Josep Call  and
James C. Kaufman
Allison B. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Josep Call
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Get access

Summary

The history of attempts to identify a correlational structure across a battery of cognitive tasks in nonhumans is reviewed, specifically with respect to mice. The literature on human cognition has long included the idea that subjects retain something of their rank-ordering across a battery of cognitive tasks, yielding what is characterized as a positive manifold of cross-task correlations. This manifold is often referred to as marking a general intelligence factor (g). The literature on individual differences in nonhumans has until recently evidenced a different conclusion, one that emphasized the evolution of niche-specific adaptive specializations rather than the evolution of general cognitive mechanisms. That conclusion in the nonhuman literature has now been successfully challenged. There is little doubt that nonhuman subjects also reveal a positive manifold that is of a similar magnitudecompared to the human data. Problems remain in deciding whether this nonhuman g is the same g as is found using human subjects. The available data are promising but not decisive in suggesting that the two constructs are marking similar processes.

Keywords

micecorrelationsgeneral intelligencepositive manifoldpredictive validityg
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Animal Cognition , pp. 653 - 666
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anastasi, A. (1961). Psychological Testing, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Anderson, B. (1993). Evidence from the rat for a general factor that underlies cognitive performance and that relates to brain size. Intelligence? Neuroscience Letters, 153, 98–112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burkart, J. M., Schubiger, M. N., & van Schaik, C. P. (2016). The evolution of general intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, doi: 10.1017/S0140525X16000959 e195CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chopik, W. J., Bremner, R. H., Defever, A. M., & Keller, V. N. (2018). How (and whether) to teach undergraduates about the replication crisis in psychological science. Teaching of Psychology, 45, 158–163. doi: 10.1177/0098628318762900Google Scholar
Collias, N. E. & Collias, E. C. (2004). Comparison of vocal signals of three species of African finches. Behaviour, 141, 1151–1171. doi: 10.1163/1568539042664588CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronbach, L. J. 1957). The two disciplines of scientific psychology. The American Psychologist, 12, 671–684.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emmerton, J. (1998). Numerosity differences and effects of stimulus density on pigeons’ discrimination performance. Animal Learning & Behavior, 26, 243–256. doi: 10.3758/BF03199218Google Scholar
Gallistel, C. R. (2003). The Principle of Adaptive Specialization as it Applies to Learning and Memory. In Kluwe, R. H., Lüer, G., Rösler, F., Kluwe, R. H., Lüer, G., & Rösler, F. (Eds.), Principles of Learning and Memory (pp. 259–280). Cambridge, MA: Birkhäuser. doi: 10.1007/978-3-0348-8030-5_15Google Scholar
Galsworthy, M. J., Paya-Cano, J. L., Monleon, S., & Plomin, R. (2002). Evidence for general cognitive ability (g) in heterogeneous stock mice and analysis of potential confounds. Genes, Brain and Behavior, 1, 88–95.Google Scholar
Galsworthy, M. J., Paya-Cano, J. L., Monleon, S., Gregoryan, G., Fernandes, C., Schalkwyk, L. C., & Plomin, R. (2005). Assessing reliability, heritability and general cognitive ability in a battery of cognitive tasks for laboratory mice. Behavior Genetics, 35, 675–692.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, H. C., Hale, G., Light, K., Kolata, S., Townsend, D. A., Goldfarb, Y., & … Matzel, L. D. (2007). Pharmacological modulation of stress reactivity dissociates general learning ability from the propensity for exploration. Behavioral Neuroscience, 121, 949–964. doi: 10.1037/0735-7044.121.5.949CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Herrmann, E., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., Call, J., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2010). The structure of individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children and chimpanzees. Psychological Science, 21, 102–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797609356511Google Scholar
Jacobs, I. & Gärdenfors, P. (2017). The false dichotomy of domain-specific versus domain-general cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, E207. doi:10.1017/S0140525X16001679Google Scholar
Kolata, S., Light, K., Townsend, D. A., Hale, G., Grossman, H. C., & Matzel, L. D. (2005). Variations in working memory capacity predict individual differences in general learning abilities among genetically diverse mice. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 84, 241–246.Google Scholar
Light, K., Kolata, S., Townsend, D. A., Grossman, H., Hale, G., & Matzel, L. D. (2008). Up-regulation of exploratory tendencies does not enhance general learning abilities in juvenile or young-adult outbred mice. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 90, 317–329.Google Scholar
Lilienfeld, S. O. (2017). Psychology’s replication crisis and the grant culture: Righting the ship. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 660–664. doi: 10.1177/1745691616687745CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Locurto, C. (1991). Sense and Nonsense about IQ: The Case for Uniqueness. New York: Praeger Press.Google Scholar
Locurto, C. (1997). On the Comparative Generality of g. In Tomic, W. & Kingma, J. (Eds.), Advances in Cognition and Education (pp. 79–100). Greenwich: JAI Press.Google Scholar
Locurto, C. (2016). G and g: Two markers of a general cognitive ability, or none? In Burkart, Schubiger, & van Schaik. (2016). The evolution of general intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, 38. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X16001709 e211Google Scholar
Locurto, C. & Scanlon, C. (1998). Individual differences and a spatial learning factor in two strains of mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112, 344–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locurto, C., Fortin, E., & Sullivan, R. (2003). The structure of individual differences in heterogeneous strain mice across problem types and motivational conditions. Genes, Brain, & Behavior, 2, 1–16.Google Scholar
Locurto, C., Benoit, A., Crowley, C., & Miele, A. (2006). The structure of individual differences in batteries of rapid acquisition tasks in mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 378–388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locurto, C., Fox, M., & Mazzella, A. (2015). Implicit learning in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) and pigeons (Columba livia). Learning & Behavior, 43, 129–142. doi: 10.3758/s13420–015-0167-0Google Scholar
Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-852367-3.Google Scholar
Mackintosh, N. J., Wilson, B., & Boakes, R. A. (1985). Differences in Mechanisms of Intelligence among Vertebrates. In Weiskrantz, L. (Ed.), Animal Intelligence (pp. 53–66). Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Macphail, E. M. (1982). Brain and Intelligence in Vertebrates. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Macphail, E. M. (1985). Comparative studies of animal intelligence. Is Spearman’s g really Hull’s D? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 234–235.Google Scholar
Macphail, E. M. (1987). The comparative psychology of intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 645–656.Google Scholar
Matzel, L. D., Han, Y. R., Grossman, H. Karnik, M. S., Patel, D., Scott, N., Specht, S. M., & Gandhi, C. C. (2003). Individual differences in the expression of a “general” learning ability in mice. Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 6423–6433.Google Scholar
Matzel, L. D., Wass, C., & Kolata, S. (2011) Individual differences in animal intelligence: Learning, reasoning, selective attention and inter-species conservation of a cognitive trait. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 116, 181–192.Google Scholar
Matzel, L. D., Kolata, S. Light, K., & Sauce, B. (2016). The tendency for social submission predicts superior cognitive performance in previously isolated male mice. Behavioural Processes, 134, 12–21.Google Scholar
Matzel, L. D. & Sauce, B. (2017). Individual differences: Case studies of rodent and primate intelligence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 43, 32–340. doi: 10.1037/xan0000152Google ScholarPubMed
Miller, L. T. & Vernon, P. A. (1992). The general factor in short-term memory, intelligence, and reaction time. Intelligence, 16, 5–30.Google Scholar
Royce, J. R. (1950). The factorial analysis of animal behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 47, 235–259. doi: 10.1037/h0061384CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Royce, J. R. (1966). Concepts Generated in Comparative and Physiological Psychological Observations. In Cattell, R. B. (Ed.), Handbook of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (pp. 642–683). Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Sauce, B., Wass, C., Smith, A., Kwan, S., & Matzel, L. D. (2014) The external-internal loop of interference: Two types of attention and their influence on the learning abilities of mice. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 116, 181–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seligman, M. E. & Hager, J. L. (1972). Biological Boundaries of Learning. East Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Spearman, C. E. (1904). “General intelligence,” objectively determined and measured. American Journal of Psychology. 15, 201–293. doi: 10.2307/1412107Google Scholar
Spearman, C. (1927). The Abilities of Man. Oxford, England: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Terrace, H. (2010). The comparative psychology of serially organized behavior. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 5, 523–558. doi: 10.3819/ccbr.2010.50002Google Scholar
Wahlsten, D. (1978). Behavioral Genetics and Animal Learning. In Anisman, H. & Bignami, G. (Eds.), Psychopharmacology of Aversively Motivated Behavior (pp. 63–118). New York: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, J. M. (1977). A Phylogenetic Approach to Learning and Intelligence. In Oliverio, A. (Ed.), Genetics, Environment and Intelligence (pp. 37–56). New York: North-Holland.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×