Does your dog understand you when you point at something? If so, this may be one of the few pop intelligence quizzes on which it can outscore a chimpanzee.
Previous studies had shown that dogs can pass a test in which a human points to a container and the dog must look inside it to find food. Human one-year-olds can pass this kind of test too. But chimpanzees have a hard time with it. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany wondered if these previous tests were unfair to chimpanzees. Would changing the setup of the experiment prove that chimps really do understand our gesturing?
In previous versions of the experiment, chimpanzees had been seated behind a barrier, while dogs were in the same room as the humans. Additionally, the objects that the animals were asked to choose between usually sat between the human experimenter and ...
