My friends working on the New Caledonian Crow have a new paper out in today’s Proceedings of the Royal society. The paper “Do New Caledonian crows solve physical problems through causal reasoning?” by Alex Taylor et al provides evidence of how crows can reason about physical problems:
The extent to which animals other than humans can reason about physical problems is contentious. The benchmark test for this ability has been the trap-tube task. We presented New Caledonian crows with a series of two-trap versions of this problem. Three out of six crows solved the initial trap-tube. These crows continued to avoid the trap when the arbitrary features that had previously been associated with successful performances were removed. However, they did not avoid the trap when a hole and a functional trap were in the tube. In contrast to a recent primate study, the three crows then solved a causally equivalent but visually distinct problem—the trap-table task. The performance of the three crows across the four transfers made explanations based on chance, associative learning, visual and tactile generalization, and previous dispositions unlikely. Our findings suggest that New Caledonian crows can solve complex physical problems by reasoning both causally and analogically about causal relations. Causal and analogical reasoning may form the basis of the New Caledonian crow’s exceptional tool skills.
We’re trying out a new way of presenting results – crowtube! Another friend of ours, Marc Tadaki, has made a (wonderful) video of Alex explaining the experiment:
[youtube:http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=M52ZVtmPE9g]
One Response to “Do New Caledonian crows solve physical problems through causal reasoning?”
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Wow, that’s really cool. I didn’t realise that research with crows was being carried out here in Auckland.
I’ve been watching Mynas recently and their uncanny ability to step out of the way of cars as if they either are really good at predicting the trajectory of the car or that they know there are certain limits on the road that a car is constrained to.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some interesting research waiting to be had with Mynas.
Crows though… they’re very cool. I want one as a minion to go steal stuff for me.