The Conversation Weekly Teaching animals irrelevant skills can reveal the secrets of cognition
Aug 14, 2025
Scarlett Howard, a biologist at Monash University, specializes in animal cognition and has taught bees to distinguish between odd and even numbers. She discusses the curious world of training animals to perform tasks outside their natural instincts, like goldfish driving cars. Howard emphasizes the importance of these seemingly irrelevant experiments, claiming they unlock secrets of cognition and support future technological advancements. She also reflects on the balance between ecological relevance and cognitive exploration in research, highlighting the unexpected insights gained.
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Irrelevance Is Often Unclear
- 'Ecologically irrelevant' depends on perspective and is hard to define strictly.
- Even odd-versus-even tests might later reveal real-world relevance we can't currently predict.
Strange Animal Experiments
- Scarlett recounts weird animal experiments like fish driving cars and primates using Arabic numerals.
- She uses these examples to show researchers often test abilities far removed from an animal's ecology.
From Fear To Working With Bees
- Scarlett describes how she began working with bees despite initial fear and later grew to love them.
- She highlights training single bees repeatedly and observing their memory and behaviour during experiments.