# NSF Workshop Report: Exploring Measurements and Interpretations of Intelligent Behaviors Across Animal Model Systems

## TL;DR

This paper explores how intelligence is defined and measured across different animal species, highlighting the challenges and insights from neuroscience.

## Contribution

The paper presents a comparative analysis of intelligence across diverse animal models, emphasizing the need for a unified framework.

## Key findings

- Intelligence manifests differently across species, influenced by ecological niches and evolutionary diversity.
- Comparative studies are essential to understand the neural basis of intelligence across species.
- Convergent evolution in working memory is observed between primates and crows.

## Abstract

Defining intelligence is a challenging and fraught task, but one that neuroscientists are repeatedly confronted with. A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how phenomena like intelligent behaviors emerge from nervous systems. This requires some determination of what defines intelligence and how to measure it. The challenge is multifaceted. For instance, as we begin to describe and understand the brain in increasingly specific physical terms (e.g., anatomy, cell types, activity patterns), we amplify an ever‐growing divide in how we connect measurable properties of the brain to less tangible concepts like intelligence. As our appreciation for evolutionary diversity in neuroscience grows, we are further confronted with whether there can be a unifying theory of intelligence. The National Science Foundation (NSF) NeuroNex consortium recently gathered experts from multiple animal model systems to discuss intelligence across species. We summarize here the different perspectives offered by the consortium, with the goal of promoting thought and debate of this ancient question from a modern perspective, and asking whether defining intelligence is a useful exercise in neuroscience or an ill‐posed and distracting question. We present data from the vantage points of humans, macaques, ferrets, crows, octopuses, bees, and flies, highlighting some of the noteworthy capabilities of each species within the context of each species’ ecological niche and how these may be challenged by climate change. We also include a remarkable example of convergent evolution between primates and crows in the circuit and molecular basis for working memory in these highly divergent animal species.

• Overview of challenges in defining and measuring intelligence in neuroscience, considering evolutionary diversity and ecological niches.

• Insights from humans, macaques, ferrets, crows, octopuses, bees, and flies, including how intelligence manifests in their respective contexts.

• In order to more equivocally define intelligence ‐ both in behaviors, and in the neural circuits from which they arise ‐ a return to more comparative work is essential.