The insult ‘birdbrain’ probably stems from the misconception that birds possess little to no intelligence since they have very tiny, nut-sized brains. But this age-old analogy couldn’t be further from the truth, considering how savvy these creatures have proven themselves to be.
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Crows, in particular, are counted amongst the most intelligent animals owing to their ability to fashion tools, understand analogies and exercise control. And now, a new study led by the University of Tübingen shows that crows possess the cognitive ability for one of the linguistic elements that make human language so complex — making them at least as intelligent as a three-year-old human child!
Recursion, or the capacity to recogonise paired elements in larger sequences, has been claimed as one of the key features of human symbolic competence. To better understand recursion, consider the example “The rat the cat chased ran.” Although slightly confusing, adult humans can easily discern that it was the rat that ran and the cat that chased. And this capacity to pair the elements “rat” to “ran” and “cat” to “chased” in a sentence is recursion.
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For decades, scientists have thought that humans, or at least primates, are the only animals capable of understanding recursion. But about two years ago, researchers found that some kinds of monkeys can understand the idea of recursion on a par with three- to four-year-old human children, albeit with some extra training. The team has now conducted the same experiments with crows, and they might have outdone the monkeys in certain aspects!
The experiments basically involved training test subjects to choose bracket pairs in a sentence made of symbols — choosing the parentheses in the sentence {()}, for example. Once the crows got a general idea of how it worked, the team created longer sequences to see if the test subjects could still pick out the embedded ones.
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As with the monkeys, the researchers found that the test subjects could pick out the embedded characters in 40% of trials, but without the extra training that the monkeys received.
Not only does this study demonstrate that recursive capabilities are not limited to the primate genealogy, but it also helps reiterate just how smart crows are.
The study’s findings are detailed in Science Advances and can be accessed here.
NOTE – This article was originally published in weather and can be viewed here
Tags: #'birdbrain', #birds, #climate, #climatechange, #Crows, #environment, #getgreengetgrowing, #gngagritech, #greenstories, #nature
