Self-learning

Self learning ability is a key feature of an intelligent being.
However, if you test an intelligent being within a limited short time, self learning doesn't immediately appear as an essential component. Anyway, you may conclude by a quick test that you are more intelligent than a monkey; a monkey is more intelligent than a rat; this rat appears as  being more intelligent than a lizard; a lizard is more intelligent than a clam!
Comparing Man and Chimpanzee, please, don't be too condescending against Chimps. Otherwise you would be a little bit surprised if I selected the following test: Look at this video: a monkey performing a short-term memory test.
An intelligence test gives an evaluation of a total amount of skills, including genetically inherited behavior, learned behavior, learned knowledge, problem solving skills, conceptualization...
Back to learning and self learning:
Learning includes memorization. Inherent value of learning is re-usability.
Personal experiences may apply whenever similar circumstances occur.  A mere memorization is not reusable. Taking into account the huge amount of possibilities, there is never two identical situations. Learning process and memorization include approximation and global description. This is a condition for re-usability of experience. The need of a global fuzzy description of a past experience is a first step on the way to conceptualization.
Self learning requires self marking of learned patterns.
Learned patterns are used to forecast the consequences of an action.
If this forecast fails, the pattern will be downgraded from good forecast to bad forecast.
But this pattern was just selected because it was in a way similar to the present situation. In order to make a difference between the new situation and the ancient one, there is a need of complete memorization of each situation beside the need of global and fuzzy memorization. Thanks to memorized details of the old situation, the learning process tries and shapes the differences between the new situation and the ancient one. Both remain fully memorized for a future comparison to another situation, if needed. However, the content of learned patterns lies in fuzzy contours just sufficient enough to underline the differences between two situations. If patterns were crisp and sharp, they were never applicable to any other new situation. These patterns may link to acute recalls, but learned patterns are of a different nature. However, "acute" recalls may be partially rebuilt from patterns linked together with short-term memory. This is a known issue for eyewitness accuracy (more about this topic). This is another story.


If you liked the above video there is a longer one about the same topic: Ayumu the Chimp.