Ecology
Black bears can count, scientists have found out. Three bears living in captivity underwent a series of tests based on numbers on a touchscreen computer. The results of these tests were simply amazing, the researchers wrote in the journal Animal Behaviour.
The animals had to choose between two sets of different numbers of peas, and were rewarded with a treat for the correct answers. “People often don't realize that bears are very intelligent animals,” says Jennifer Vonk, research leader.
Bears have the largest relative brain size of any predator, but their cognitive abilities are not well understood. Dr. Wonk, a psychology professor at the University of Oakland, says North American black bears were the first to be trained to understand processes and understan
d equipment to pass new ones tests.
For the first time, bears worked with a touch screen. None of the researchers have previously worked with large predators, offering them similar experiments.
During testing, scientists asked the bears to choose the number of peas on the screen. It turned out that they could understand where there was more and where was less. They touched the screen, choosing certain sets of peas. One of the bears could even understand a very large number of peas.
Scientists wanted to make sure that bears do not just estimate the size of an object, as many animals can do, but can identify the number of individual objects in it. During the experiment, scientists tried not to show sets of items at once, and in some cases, figures even moved across the screen, or scientists changed the area occupied by objects.
Bears don't just estimate the area occupied by a large number of peas, they can actually count the number of individual objects in a set.
Black bears in the wild are more likely to be hermits and do not need each other's company. Perhaps it is animals that do not live in a group that have the ability to estimate the number of items.
Scientists have previously conducted similar experiments with primates, but this is the first time they have tried to compare the cognitive abilities of primates and bears. The results were quite similar. Scientists plan to further investigate questions regarding the mental abilities of bears using a computer.