Understanding what makes human unique is a fundamental research drive for comparative psychologists. Cognitive abilities such as theory of mind, cooperation or mental time travel have been considered uniquely human. Despite empirical evidence showing that animals other than humans are able (to some extent) of these cognitive achievements, findings are still heavily contested. In this context, being able to abstract relations of similarity has also been considered one of the hallmarks of human cognition. While previous research has shown that other animals (e.g., primates) can attend to relational similarity, less is known about what invertebrates can do. In this talk, I will present a series of spatial matching tasks that previously were used with children and great apes and that I adapted for use with wild-caught bumblebees. The findings from these studies suggest striking similarities between vertebrates and invertebrates in their abilities to attend to relational similarity.

In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. In this talk, I will examine the validity and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between consciousness and intelligence. I will do so by examining the cognitive abilities associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention Schema Theory (AST), and demonstrating that all three theories specifically relate conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans. With this insight, we will turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of each of the three functional theories. Given this apparent trend, I will use the motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a unified model. I believe that doing so can enable the development of artificial agents which are not only more generally intelligent but are also consistent with multiple current theories of conscious function.