[LINK] "Clever crows beaten by babies in causality test"

[rfmcdonald]

Via io9 I came across an article by Wired's Kadhim Shubber summarizing a study on the intelligence of the famously bright New Caledonian crow, "Of babies and birds: complex tool behaviours are not sufficient for the evolution of the ability to create a novel causal intervention".

If you observed a brick falling onto a button that dispensed food, you would quickly realise that you didn't need the brick to get the food. You could just push the button yourself.

You have observed a sequence of cause and effect, and although you haven't directly experienced it, you can figure out what's going on and get the food.

Caledonian crows, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, aren't able to do this.

"The crows are great at solving certain types of problems but, as our new study shows, struggle at others," lead author Alex Taylor told Wired.co.uk via email. "Discovering the limits of their cognition allows us to get a better understanding of how intelligence evolves, and which aspects our our cognition are particularly special."

Taylor and his colleagues have studied Caledonian crows for years, and have been the source of numerous papers on their intelligence, including a March paper that replicated Aesop's Fable of a thirsty crow using stones to raise the water level in a half-filled container.

Indeed a 2009 study showed that the crows are able to understand cause and effect quite well. Crows that received food as an effect of pushing a platform with their beak then learned to use other tools, like stones, to move the platform if it was out of reach.

The crucial difference, said Taylor, is that this required a direct experience. The crows had previously pushed the platform themselves.

"Animals are very good at learning from their own experience, or via observing the effects of others (social learning)," he said. "But so far only humans appear to be able to simply observe an effect in the world, and, without reference to their own behaviour or another humans, then create a novel behaviour to cause the effect."