How Smart Are Crows Compared To Other Animals – Crows are the most intelligent creatures in the animal kingdom. They have the ability to make principled decisions and to create and use tools. They also show that numbers are Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—that had long been thought of. It is a unique human ability.
Repetition is an important feature of language. It enables us to form complex sentences from simple words. Take the sentence “The mouse that the cat chased ran away”. Here the clause “cat chased” is enclosed within “mouse ran”. For decades, psychologists believed that repetition was a trait unique to humans. Some considered it the key feature that distinguished human language from other forms of communication between animals. But questions about that assumption persisted. “There has always been interest in whether non-human animals can understand repetitive sequences,” says Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Andreas Nieder, professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
How Smart Are Crows Compared To Other Animals
In a study of monkeys and human adults and children published in 2020, a group of researchers reported that the ability to generate repetitive sequences may not actually be unique to our species. Both humans and monkeys were shown a display with two pairs of bracketed symbols that appeared in random order. Subjects were trained to touch in a “center-embedded” repetitive sequence such as or ( ). After answering correctly, the humans were given verbal feedback, and the monkeys were given a small amount of food or juice as a reward. The researchers then presented their subjects with a completely new set of brackets and observed how often they arranged them in a repetitive fashion. Two of the three monkeys in the experiment produced repeated sequences such as ), although they needed an additional training session to do so. One of the animals produced the repeated sequence in about half of the trials. By comparison, three- to four-year-olds made repeated sequences on about 40 percent of trials.
Ways Crows Are Smarter Than You Think
This paper prompted Liao and his colleagues to investigate whether crows, along with their known cognitive abilities, also possess the ability to replicate. Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained two crows to generate pairs of parentheses in a centrally embedded repeating sequence. The researchers then tested the bird’s ability to spontaneously generate such repetitive sequences on a new set of symbols. The crows also performed as well as the children. The birds produced the repeated sequence in about 40 percent of the trials—but without the additional training required by the monkeys. The results were published today.
The discovery that ravens can perceive centrally connected structures and that they are better at doing so than monkeys is “fascinating,” says Giorgio Valortigara, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento in Italy. The findings raise the question of why nonhuman animals might use this ability, he added. “They don’t seem to have anything similar to human language, so repetition is probably related to other cognitive functions,” he says. One hypothesis is that animals may use repetition to represent relationships within their social groups.
When a 2020 study on repetition abilities in humans and monkeys was published, some experts remained unconvinced that monkeys understood repetition. Instead, some argued, the animals chose the repetition sequence by learning the sequence in which the brackets were displayed. For example, if the training sequence was [ ( ) ], and the monkeys were later shown a different pair, such as ( ) and , they would first choose a bracket that they recognized from training, then the new one. Brackett will pick a pair they have never seen before. At the first end, they would choose the matching bracket from the training session at the end of the sequence (because they knew that the matching bracket came last).
To overcome this limitation, Liao and his colleagues expanded the sequence from two pairs to three pairs—eg. With three pairs of symbols, Liao says, the likelihood of creating a sequence without understanding the basic concept of repetition is greatly reduced. Here, too, the researchers found that the birds were most likely to choose the center-connected response.
Dirty Crows — Imagelight
Some scientists remain skeptical. Arnaud Ray, a senior researcher in psychology at the French National Center for Scientific Research, says these results can still be understood from a simple associative learning perspective—in which the animal learns to associate one symbol with another, e.g. that of connecting an open bracket. with a stop. A key reason, they point out, lies in a peculiarity of the study design: The researchers placed a border around the closed brackets in their sets—which the authors note was necessary to help the animals determine the order of the brackets. (The same bordered sequence was used in the 2020 study.) For Ray, this is an important limitation of the study because the animals could perceive these border symbols—which always come at the end of a repeating sequence—to reward them. Given, thus helping them learn only the order in which the open and closed brackets were displayed.
In InRey’s view, the notion of “repetitive processing” as a unique form of cognition is itself flawed. Even in humans, he says, this ability can most likely be explained simply by associative learning mechanisms — which he and his colleagues suggested in a 2012 study of baboons — And to date, there has been no satisfactory explanation of how the ability to recognize and such sequences would be coded in the human brain. According to Ray, researchers currently fall broadly into two camps: one that believes that human language is built on unique abilities such as the ability to understand repetition, and the other that believes that it is a much simpler process. has emerged from such as associative learning.
But Liao noted that even with the help of borders, the crows still had to detect the embedded sequence in the center where the open and closed brackets were paired on the outside. In other words, if the birds only learned that the open brackets were at the beginning of the sequence and the closed ones were at the end, you would expect an equal proportion of (mismatched and correct responses). But, she says, she and her colleagues found that crows chose the latter more than the former, even more complex sequences of three pairs of brackets.
For Liao, birds whose ancestors branched off from primates long ago on the evolutionary tree of life also appear to be able to analyze and generate repetitive sequences, meaning that this ability is “evolutionary.” is ancient” or is it independently evolving. The product of this is known as convergent evolution. Because bird brains lack the layered neocortex of primates, this observation, Liao added, suggests that later brain architecture may not be necessary to exhibit this cognitive ability.
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For Mathias Osvath, an associate professor of cognitive science at Lund University in Sweden, who was not involved in the new paper, the findings fit into a long line of studies showing that birds have many primate-like abilities. There are cognitive abilities. “To me, this just adds to the catalog of amazing data showing that birds are completely misunderstood,” Osoth says. “To say that mammals have taken over the world scientifically is simply wrong.”
Diana Cowan is a freelance journalist covering health and life sciences. He is based in Berlin.Credit: Nick Higgins
Discover the science that is changing the world. Explore our digital archive dating back to 1845, featuring essays by more than 150 Nobel laureates. Crows are highly intelligent. They can use tools to get what they want, such as the New Caledonian crows in the South Pacific island of the same name, which thorn twigs to grasp rotting logs. And according to new research, crows are smarter than we think.
According to a 2020 study in Science, crows and other corvids (a family of birds that includes crows and magpies) “know what they know and can reflect on the contents of their minds.”
Scientists Suggest A New Layer To Crows’ Cognitive Complexity
It is considered a cornerstone of self-awareness and is shared with humans by only a handful of animal species, such as monkeys and great apes. Crows can also use their complex brains to come up with creative solutions, such as dropping nuts on the road so that passing cars can open them, for example.
The ability to think about and respond to a problem may be due to the large number of brain cells in crows that process information. This trait appears not only in humans but also in non-human primates. A study published in January 2022 in the Journal of Comparative Neurology compared the brains of chickens, pigeons and ostriches and found that corvid brains have more densely packed neurons—up to 200 per hemisphere. 300 million neurons—enable efficient communication between brain cells. . The intelligence of the crow is at least equal to that of some monkeys, and may, in fact, approach that of the great.
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