Crows ‘smarter than apes’

Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 3:09 am

Crows, hailed as the Einsteins of the avian world, have more impressive bird brains than you ever thought — the birds are cleverer than even our closest relatives, a new study has suggested.

Researchers at Auckland University have carried out the study and found that crows are able to outsmart apes when it comes to finding a way to access food without it falling into a trap.

According to lead researcher Prof Russell Gray, it is “the most conclusive evidence to date” that the birds are indeed smart, showing that they can reason causally and use analogy in a way not seen even in the great apes.

In their study, the researchers presented six crows with a trap-tube with three arbitrary features inside it. When the crows were presented with variations of the problem where these features were removed, three of the crows continued to solve the problem, suggesting the crows had not simply learn to pull the treat away from these features.

The researchers then presented the crows with a trap-tube with two holes — one hole allowed food to fall via it and out of the trap, so the bird could eat it. The other hole had a base and so trapped food that was pulled into it. The three smartest crows failed to consistently solve this problem and appeared reluctant to pull the food into either hole, suggesting they were using the holes to guide their actions.

Finally, the crows were presented with a trap-table problem. In this problem, an animal has to choose between pulling food across a wooden table or pulling food into a hole set in the table.

In a recent study, 20 individuals from the great ape species were unable to transfer their knowledge from the trap-table and trap-tube or vice versa, despite the fact that both these problems work in the same way. Strikingly the crows in the University of Auckland study were able to solve the trap-table problem after their experience with the trap-tube, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

“The crows appeared to solve these complex problems by identifying causal regularities. The crows’ success with the trap-table suggests that the crows were transferring their causal understanding to this problem by analogical reasoning,” Prof Gray said.

The study has been published in the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences’ journal. ‘

(PTI)

( This post is from an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by APakistanNews.Com.)

Crows ‘smarter than apes’

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