drghirlanda

Well, it seems I have not written here since two years ago! It has been a busy and exciting period, largely occupied by a book project that is looking at cognitive differences between humans and other animals. One of the by-products of this project is the title paper, a meta-analysis effort in collaboration with Johan Lind. In this paper, we offer a critical look at recent claims that birds, and in particular corvids, can “understand” properties of the physical world such as “light objects float, heavy objects sink,” and are able to use such knowledge to solve new problems. The performance of these birds in some tasks has been compared to that of 5-7 year old children.

The best way to understand the puzzles presented to the crows is to watch this video, from Jelbert et al. (2014) :

From the video, the performance of New Caledonian crows appears impressive. The results of our meta-analysis, however, are not supportive of the original claims. In summary, it seems that crows learn the correct behavior by trial-and-error as they perform the task. In almost all tasks, the birds start choosing one of the two options at chance, and only gradually they switch to the more functional option. The video shows the final stage of learning, rather than the initial random behavior.

We also compared the crow data with data from children, and we found clear differences. While younger children do not do well on most tasks, children aged 6 and older perform much, much better than birds, despite having received much less training.

There are one or two examples of tasks in which birds do well from the very beginning, as well as some tasks in which birds do not learn at all. In our paper, we argue that both occurrences can be understood based on established knowledge of animal learning, and especially associative learning.

The full article has appeared in Animal Behaviour.