How does your self-control compare to big breasts?

Big tits seem to have almost as much self-control as chimpanzees, if the results of a new experiment are accurate. They might even have more self-control than humans who still make jokes about the name "great tit".

Research continues to show that many birds are very intelligent. Magpies can pass the mirror test, pigeons can sail incredible distances, crows can plan future events, crows can make memory tools – the list goes on. New research shows that even a tiny bird, the great tit, exhibits a behavior that we typically bond with the intelligence: inhibition.

"The Great Tit, a small songbird who is learning very well, is almost at the level of chimpanzees. Authors of Lund University in Sweden write in the study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology [19659004] The researchers captured 36 large wild tits, a common European bird, and brought them to the test facility.They first teach the birds to eat in an opaque cylinder. have familiarized some of the birds with a transparent cylinder or a transparent wall inside their cage.Others have been tested without the experimenters showing things transparent to the birds.

For each test, the birds received a clear cylinder different from all the objects they had already seen at the drive.The cylinder had an opening on the end and a worm of flour inside. movement of l & # 3 9, bird was pecking the cylinder wall, he failed the test. If his first move was to go to the side and hang the flour worm without touching the wall, he passed.

Scientists use this test as a measure of self-control, or at least inhibition, as it "requires inhibitory skills to overcome immediate motor responses," according to the paper. This is not the only test of animal self control; Other experiments consist in seeing if an animal will spend a small reward to get a bigger one.

More than 10 trials, large breasts that had seen transparent cylinders before passing the test 80 percent of the time, while those who had not spent 61 percent of the time.

A success rate of 80% is higher than most other species of birds for the same test, but not as good as corvids (birds such as crows and magpies). Sixty-one percent are always higher than birds with similar sized or larger brains, such as song sparrows or marsh sparrows.

There are obvious limits to a study like this. It was in a laboratory, not in nature; it took a training element; and he involved only three dozen birds from one place. But the biggest limitation in comparing these results to other studies on birds is that many birds fail the test the first time. "The researchers let the birds perform the task 10 times and use the percentage of times that they were successful as a measure," said Ben Freeman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia who does not work at all. did not participate in the study, in Gizmodo. . "Most birds fail this task the first time or the second time, but then learn to stop bumping their beaks into the tubing."

Aside from these issues, the experiment still shows something important about the intelligence of birds. The big tits are tiny and have a brain of about 0.44 cubic centimeter (0.027 cubic inch) in volume, a little bigger than a pea. "This study shows that the idea" bigger is not big "is not scrapped – here is a bird that weighs less than 10 cents, and it's better than lemurs." Brain size may not be a useful measure to compare birds and mammals.

It's hard to say how intelligent other animals are because we can not know what's really going on inside their brains. But when it is a standardized inhibition test, the big breasts seem to come out up.

[Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology]