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Use of tools
Their intelligence is displayed through their ability to fashion natural materials into tools that help them gather food more conveniently. While the use and manufacture of tools to extract ants and termites is a well-documented behavior in wild chimpanzees, it has never been observed in other great apes in their natural habitat and never seen to be done by other primates in captivity.

In terms of manufacturing tools for the use of extracting for western lowland gorillas, gorillas are able to adapt tools to a particular use by selecting branches, remove projections such as leaves and bark, and adapting their length to the depth of the holes. It appears that they also anticipate the use of the tool since they begin with biggest sticks available and progressively modify it until it is the perfect fit for inserting into a hole that contains food. This demonstrates the gorillas' acquisition of high level sensorimotor intelligence similar to that of young human children.

In the past, there was a gorilla that used a stick to measure how deep water was. In 2009, there was a western lowland gorilla at Buffalo zoo that used a bucket to collect water. Most notably, an experiment was conducted at Buffalo Zoological Gardens from 17 April 2010 to 26 June 2010 relating to this incident. The experiment involved one adult male gorilla and three adult female gorillas given five gallon buckets near a standing pool. Two of the younger female gorillas were able to successfully fill the buckets with water. This is the first record of gorillas spontaneously using tools to drink in zoos. What should be worth noting is that the environment of the zoo may affect the behavior of the gorillas.

Communication
Another example of gorillas' significant intelligence is their ability to comprehend simple sign language. In the mid-1970s, researchers turned their attention to communicating with gorillas via sign language. One gorilla, Koko, was born in San Francisco Zoo on July 4th, 1971. A woman named Francine Patterson officially started working with Koko on July 12th, 1972, with the goal of teaching her sign language. In the beginning, Dr. Petterson focused on teaching Koko only three basic signs: "food," "drink," and "more." Koko would learn signs through observation or by Patterson, or one of her colleagues, molding Koko's hands into the correct sign. On August 7th, Patterson began a more formal routine of teaching Koko the signs, "food," "drink," and "more." In the couple weeks before that, Koko had been using gestures that seemed like attempts at the signs taught, but were deemed as coincidental and random and not intended for the actual purpose. Only two days after they started a more formal routine, Koko started responding consistently with the sign "food" when prompted to. Within the first three months, Koko made 16 different combinations of signs and was also starting to form simple questions by using eye contact and different positioning of signs by the body. Then moving forward 18 months, Koko had learned 22 signs. Over time, Koko has mastered more than 1,000 signs and is said to be able to connect up to 8 words together to form a statement expressing wants, needs, thoughts, or simple responses.

There has been a study examining the ability of western lowland gorillas to give to and exchange with humans. This involved humans holding objects such as fruit, leaves or peanuts in one hand. Once the gorillas had given twigs to the humans, they would receive one of these objects. If the gorillas did not give them a twig, they would not get their desired object. The gorillas were shown to quickly learn about receiving rewards as mistakes made by the gorillas in the beginning of the experiments gradually decreased.

Studies of the mental capacity of western lowland gorillas continue.