Question: Do Squirrels have IQs? if so how do you measure it? And what sort of differences would you expect between a low IQ squirrel and a high IQ squirrel?

Pizza Ka Yee Chow answered on 14 Nov 2018:

From my perspective, establishing a battery of IQ for squirrels is difficult but not impossible. I believe squirrels do have IQ (i.e. general intelligence) that can be measured across different cognitive areas such as memory, problem solving ability, decision making etc. Because the interest in animals’ IQ is a recent interest, scientists including myself, are very hard to design suitable tasks to assess this IQ.

To measure an individual’s IQ, scientists could 1) adopt the established designs from human’s IQ tests and/or 2) design a task that can show the cognitive ability of a species. For example, to measure squirrels’ spatial memory in remembering buried nuts, we could use a box that has several opaque lids covering different compartments (so that they cannot see and cannot smell where food are). We then hide nuts in different compartments and give squirrels several experience to find these nuts. After these experience, we test their spatial memory by giving them an empty box, if squirrels remember where the nuts are, they will open the compartments that are previously contained nuts FIRST whereas the openings in previously without nuts compartment will indicate error in memory.