Octopus intelligence
New Insights Into Octopus Intelligence Challenge Human-Centric Views of Cognition
A groundbreaking study published this week in the journal Current Biology sheds new light on the cognitive abilities of octopuses, offering compelling evidence that these cephalopods exhibit complex learning behaviors once thought to be exclusive to vertebrates.
Conducted by researchers at the University of Naples Federico II and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the study involved training common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) to solve visual pattern tasks that required them to generalize concepts of sameness and difference. Not only did the animals learn to distinguish the patterns with surprising speed, but they also retained the learned rules across different contexts and sensory conditions.
The researchers used a custom-designed tank with automated visual cues and reward delivery systems to eliminate human interference. Over multiple trials, the octopuses demonstrated the ability to apply abstract logic, a capacity rarely documented in invertebrates.
These findings support the idea that advanced cognition can evolve in radically different nervous systems. Octopuses have a distributed brain with over 500 million neurons, many of which are located in their arms. Despite this unconventional architecture, they exhibit problem-solving, tool use, and even short- and long-term memory consolidation.
Beyond theoretical interest, this research could inform the development of alternative models for neural computation and AI. If biological intelligence can arise in such a distinct form, it expands the framework for understanding consciousness and learning mechanisms.
The study has also reignited ethical discussions around the treatment of octopuses in research and aquaculture. As their cognitive capacities become better understood, calls for improved welfare standards are growing louder.
Sources https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00792-8 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-abstract-learning-intelligence-cephalopod