Bigger brains not necessarily better, finds study

A new study has revealed that bigger brain size doesn't necessarily mean more intelligence.

Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), who compared mice and rats and found very similar levels of intelligence, when given a task that tested perceptual ability as well as adaptability, mice and rats performed about the same.

The researchers were able to find only one difference: rats learned somewhat faster than mice. According to Anthony Zador and Santiago Jaramillo, the training protocol, which was developed and optimized specifically for rats, might account for the slight advantage.

The finding of roughly equal intelligence has broad implications for cognition research and it was found that mice, and all the genetic tools available in them, can be used to study the neural mechanisms underlying decision-making, and they might be suitable for other cognitive tasks as well.