Brains over brawn? Brown bears (Ursus arctos) demonstrate behavioral flexibility on a multi-access box and other tasks.

Bears (Family Ursidae) are relatively understudied, yet their social and foraging habits make them a useful taxon with which to test hypotheses about the evolution of cognition. Here, we provided seven brown bears (Ursus arctos) with five measures related to behavioral flexibility: a multi-access box (MAB), a detour cylinder task, a reversal learning task, an object manipulation "insertion" task, and a novel object task. Although our sample size was insufficient to draw strong conclusions, performance on these tasks appeared to correspond with each other such that bears that achieved multiple solutions with the MAB also performed well on the insertion task, reversal learning task, and showed high behavioral diversity during the novel object task. However, high levels of performance on these tasks predicted poorer performance on the detour cylinder task. We suggest that it is important to distinguish types of inhibition when considering how inhibition might contribute to tests of behavioral flexibility. MABs require repeated innovation, behavioral diversity, persistence, and inhibitory control (i.e., they discriminate between solving via "brains" versus "brawn"), and therefore, may be ideal tests of flexibility, allowing important species comparisons. These preliminary results suggest that bears may have high behavioral flexibility supporting the cultural intelligence hypothesis that emphasizes lengthy mother-offspring relationships as an important predictor of cognitive abilities.