I hear an octopus has the intelligence of a 7 year old or a monkey is as smart as a 5 year old….. how they figure that out.
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There are many different types of cognitive test you can give a person or an animal, things like sorting objects based on color or shape, figuring out how to get a treat out of a jar, remembering which jar has a treat in it after a long time, etc. We have a pretty solid baseline for how humans perform on these types of tests, what age a child has to be to realize they need to stop standing on the rug in order to pick up the rug, etc, so if we give the test to an animal and they can do a task that a human generally needs to be at least 7 years old in order to do, then we might say “this animal has intelligence equivalent to a 7 year old child”.
One critical thing to understand however is that not all skills develop in a uniform way. So we might have an octopus that can say, unlock puzzles that would stump a 6 year old, but can’t remember which cup has a treat hidden in it as well as a 3 year old (as a made up example). In a case like this the comparison to humans becomes kind of obviously silly. Different brains are optimized for different types of task, and finding an animal that matched to humans on everything is very unlikely. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to find an animal that was better at some types of memory or thinking tasks than a human was.
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