There is a lot of interesting stuff on the topic of intelligence in non-human species:


About learning in invertebrates, relatively little is known. Although many
species have been studied, the work has on the whole been rather primitive by vertebrate
standards, and only with few species has it gone much beyond the question of
whether they are capable of learning at all.

The principal exceptions when I set out some years ago to try to remedy the deficiency
were octopuses and honeybees, whose performance in various learning situations
had been reported to be so like that of vertebrates as to suggest the operation
of common principles, but there was not much useful information even about those
animals. The octopus experiments, often quite sophisticated in purpose and design,
could not be taken seriously because of unsuitable laboratory conditions and poor
behavioral technique (Bitterman 1975b). The work with honeybees, mostly by zoologists
interested in foraging who had come upon questions about learning with which
they were not educated to deal, was highly idiosyncratic, clouded by looseness of
conception and inadequate control of important variables. It served nevertheless to
advertise the possibilities...

M. E. Bitterman
In: NATO ASI Series, Vol. G17
Intelligence and Evolutionary Biology
Edited by H.J. Jerison and I. Jerison
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1988

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