Brainy baboons tackle the PC

But what will they make of the new Windows?

It may well be that it would take an infinite number of monkeys sitting before an infinite number of typewriters to turn out the works of Shakespeare.

The task was not easy for them

Joël Fagot and colleagues

But it has taken only two baboons sitting in front of one personal computer to convince a team of researchers in France and the US that the intelligent abilities of animals may have been seriously underestimated.

The creatures were encouraged to match up different patterns of icons on a screen to earn a reward.

The research team believes the animals' success in completing the tasks shows baboons to be capable of analogous thinking, a trait usually only attributed to humans and chimpanzees.

Food reward

Sometimes the baboons saw icons which were all the same, and the other times they saw icons which were all different.

Our ancestors and those of baboons parted company 30 million years ago

After seeing a pattern, they were allowed to select from two more using the joystick.

If they matched an "all the same" grid to another "all the same" one, or an "all different" one to an "all different" one, they were given a banana-flavoured food pellet.

The baboons' score was well above what would be expected of an animal behaving randomly - though, as expected, a pair of humans given the same task achieved a better score.

The researchers believe that their baboons showed the ability to understand the concepts of sameness and difference.

"The results suggest that animals other than humans and chimpanzees can discriminate the relation between relations," Joël Fagot and colleagues write in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Conceptual leap

The ability to see that a page with 16 icons all showing an arrow has more in common with a page of 16 house icons than a page of 16 mixed icons is a key intellectual ability.

The baboons had been used in other experiments and it did take them several thousands of attempts to master using the equipment to gain food - but they did manage a success rate of over 80% in the end.

Analogical thinking and its possible precursors may very well be found in nonhuman animals - if only we assiduously look for them

Joël Fagot and colleagues

"The task was not easy for them," Dr Fagot and his colleagues write. Although discriminating the relation between relations may not be an intellectual forte of baboons, it is nevertheless within their ken," they say.

The research is likely to provoke discussion because baboons belong to a primate family which split around 30 million years ago from the ancestors that gave rise to humans and chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees and humans are much more closely related.

"Analogical thinking and its possible precursors may very well be found in nonhuman animals - if only we assiduously look for them. The search may be long and hard...," write the research team.