Author: This article is about popular science and is a bit boring. You can skip it and go to the next chapter.
——I am the dividing line——
After the ant larvae in the five nurseries emerged from pupae and became adults, the experiment soon entered the final stage: the protagonist needed to go into battle in person to test the intelligence level of these adult ants.
From the appearance point of view, the adult worker ants in nursery No. 2 are most similar to the large worker ants among parasitic ants, while the workers in nursery No. 3 are slightly larger than the large worker ants. As for the adult worker ants in Nursery No. 4 and No. 5, their bodies have a light golden color, but their body shapes are almost the same. They are all very similar to the large pale gold worker ants among the parasitic ants.
However, it is not accurate to judge by appearance alone. The protagonist needs to verify their intelligence level. In the protagonist's plan, a high level of intelligence is also their most useful specialty.
Regarding how to judge people's intelligence level, in the protagonist's original world, there are already mature standards and various forms, such as the entrance test of the famous "Mensa Club".
This kind of test usually asks questions from the aspects of attention, observation, logical thinking, imagination and memory. Only those with a converted IQ of 148 are eligible to join.
However, the ants are definitely not able to answer such advanced questions as the Mensa test. What they currently need may be a lower-level intelligence test method that is more suitable for animals. The so-called dog's age is equivalent to the human intelligence level, and the cat's age is the age of the human intelligence level. This is how to calculate.
“Intelligence is the result of a higher degree of processing of information and a series of phenomena.” This is a definition of intelligence. In addition to learning, the ability to use tools and express thoughts are areas where intelligence is evaluated.
The degree of intelligence of animals (including humans) does not entirely depend on the evolutionary selection of the brain. Its degree of development is not determined by the size of the brain, but by the connections between specific parts of the brain.
"Intelligence" roughly contains three meanings:
First, it is the ability to adapt to various situations; second, it is the ability to learn from past experiences; third, it is the ability to think abstractly and logically.
There are various standards for assessing the intelligence of animals below human level. It is not obtained through a certain IQ test, but through multiple assessments of the animal's learning ability, imitation ability, survival skills, etc.
for example:
1. Experiments on classical conditioning. Such as "conditioned reflex" experiments, which examine whether animals can respond to a stimulus that they did not respond to through experience, are also called associative learning. For example, if a bell is given as a stimulus before feeding the dog every time, the dog will salivate in response to the bell after a few times. This shows that dogs have the ability to learn by association.
In addition, experiments can also prove that the ability of associative learning also exists in flatworms.
Some researchers believe that single-celled animals such as Paramecium also have the ability to learn associatively. Like paramecium. But some people think that the conditioned response-like behavior of Paramecium may be just a kind of aftereffect maintenance of feeding behavior.
It needs to be explained here that most people may think that the speed of forming a conditioned response can indicate the height of intelligence. This is wrong. The intelligence level of an animal cannot be generally judged based on the speed of forming a certain conditioned response.
2. Test of insight ability. There are several comparative experiments on more intelligent animals.
Roundabout approach experiment: The design of this experiment is to set up a barrier (such as barbed wire) between the subject animal and the food that lures it. The animal must find a way around the barrier to get the food.
In this kind of experiment, it was found that chickens often rush straight to the barbed wire that blocks them or walk back and forth in front of the barbed wire. Only by chance can they find their way to food. Dogs and chimpanzees can easily see their way around obstacles.
Cross-thread problem: This kind of experiment is to put 2 to 4 ropes together, either in parallel or cross them in different ways, with food tied to the far end of one of them, and to test whether the subject animal can choose the rope with food tied to it.
Such experiments demonstrate that monkeys can solve simpler crossed-line problems, and that raccoons and rock squirrels can learn to choose the line with food between two parallel lines or even crossed lines. Neither dogs nor cats can solve this type of problem.
3. Reversal learning. This is an experiment to examine the flexibility of animals. The main method is to train the animals to distinguish two stimuli, usually two graphics. If you approach or touch one of them, you will get food, and if you approach or touch the other, you will not get food. The former is called a positive stimulus, and the latter is called a negative stimulus. After the animal learns to distinguish the response, reverse the positive and negative stimuli and observe how quickly the animal changes the learned response, sometimes repeatedly.
In experiments with repeated inversions, it was found that the speed at which birds and mammals changed their responses (the number of times they practiced) accelerated with the number of times the inversion was repeated. After many repetitions, after a single trial, the discrimination response is reversed. The reversal of the turtle's spatial discrimination response was also relatively easy, but the reversal of its visual discrimination response was unsuccessful. Fish and octopus also show the ability to reverse discrimination responses, but they are slower and require more training times. This shows that lower animals have a lower ability to change their behavior.
4. Master certain rules of learning. There are several experiments that observe whether animals can form a certain "concept" from experience and thus find the correct way to solve a certain problem.
Probabilistic learning: The simpler one is spatial discrimination. For example, asking an animal to choose an object on the left, or walking to the left, gives it a greater chance of getting food, while choosing the opposite side gives it a smaller chance of getting food. The left and right choices of fish and cockroaches were random, while the left and right choices of turtles, pigeons, rats, and monkeys were made at a rate similar to the probability of getting food from the left or right.
Odd-even selection: Give the animal 3 choices, two of which are the same in shape, size or color, and the other is different from them; the 3 objects are randomly arranged, and the animal is trained to choose the one that is different from the two. Experiments have found that it is very difficult for rats to learn this choice method. Monkeys learn it easily.
Learning set: Prepare many pairs of objects and give them to the animals to choose one by one. Observe how many pairs of selection exercises the animal has gone through, and how quickly it can choose the object with the food reward after switching to a new pair.
The accuracy of selecting the first few pairs in this experiment was very low. With practice, some animals are considered to have gradually mastered the rule of "don't change if they win, and change if they lose".
From the results obtained from this experiment, it can be seen that the speed of completing this learning task is obviously related to the level of system development of the species.
These slightly complicated experiments are exactly what the master needs these experimental ants to test.
