Bird Brain
Posted on December 14, 2008 Comments (6)
Bird-brains smarter than your average ape
“The crows appeared to solve these complex problems by identifying causal regularities,” says Professor Russell Gray of the Department of Psychology. “The crows’ success with the trap-table suggests that the crows were transferring their causal understanding to this novel problem by analogical reasoning. However, the crows didn’t understand the difference between a hole with a bottom and one without. This suggests the level of cognition here is intermediate between human-like reasoning and associative learning.”
“It was very surprising to see the crows solve the trap-table,” says PhD student Alex Taylor. “The trap table puzzle was visually different from the trap-tube in its colour, shape and material. Transfer between these two distinct problems is not predicted by theories of associative learning and is something not even the great apes have so far been able to do.”
Related: Cool Crow Research – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Backyard Wildlife: Crows – Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt
Categories: Life Science, Podcast, Research, Science, Students
Tags: animals, Australia, birds, brain, cool, scientific inquiry, think, tool use, university research, webcasts
6 Responses to “Bird Brain”
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December 15th, 2008 @ 6:24 am
I’ve heard of this before…also with squirrels. Not 100% sure if it proves “intelligence” as such…generally animals will repeat repetitive actions for reward and some argue this isn’t actually “intelligence.” I’m open minded on this though!
October 14th, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
some parrots have a near-perfect sense of rhythm; swaying their bodies, bobbing their heads and tapping their feet in time to a beat…
February 5th, 2010 @ 10:05 am
This crow was the first animal observed using 3 tools in the correct sequence, without explicit training.
August 2nd, 2011 @ 8:42 am
This story begins on Valentine’s Day in 1985 when biologist Stacey O’Brien meets a four-day-old baby barn owl in a fateful encounter that would turn into an astonishing 19-year saga…
April 15th, 2012 @ 5:58 pm
once the baboons learned the rule, could generalize to new words that they had not seen before…
July 25th, 2014 @ 2:07 am
In the webcast an Aukuu bird (Black-crowned Night Heron) fishes using bread as bait…