Are you smarter than a fifth grader? How about a bird or a chimp?

A paper published in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society examines the different approaches of evaluating avian behavior and how it relates to intelligence.

The idea that the six-layered neocortex of most mammals is the prerequisite for complex cognition still pervades popular culture. Indeed, intellectually less endowed individuals in Western society are often called ‘bird-brains’. Perhaps more surprisingly, this view is still held by many comparative psychologists and neuroscientists. One reason for this long-held, but ultimately incorrect view is the confusing terminology used to name the different regions of the avian telencephalon (forebrain). Traditionally, regions in the avian cerebrum ended with the suffix—striatum, meaning derived from the basal ganglia (figure 1a). As the vertebrate basal ganglia is involved in  peciesspecific behaviours, such as maternal care, sexual behaviour and feeding (Reiner et al. 1998), bird-brains were deemed incapable of producing flexible or intelligent behaviour. It is now known that this nomenclature is based on a fallacy; large parts of the avian forebrain are derived, not from the striatum, but from the pallium (figure 1b). Interestingly, the mammalian neocortex is also derived from the pallium (Jarvis & Consortium 2005). This places the avian forebrain into a new light, where bird behaviour may now be explained as an adaptation to solving socioecological problems similar to mammals, possessing hardware that is different to mammals, albeit evolved from the same structure. Pepperberg (1999) provides a useful computer analogy when comparing mammalian and avian brains; mammalian brains are like IBM-PCs, whereas avian brains are like Apple Macintoshes; the wiring and processing are different, but the resulting output (i.e. behaviour) is similar.

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