Rooks perceive support relations similar to six-month-old babies

Some corvids have demonstrated cognitive abilities that rival or exceed those of the great apes; for example, tool use in New Caledonian crows, and social cognition, episodic-like memory and future planning in Western scrub-jays. Rooks appear to be able to solve novel tasks through causal reasoning...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2010-01, Vol.277 (1678), p.147-151
Main Authors: Bird, Christopher D., Emery, Nathan J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Birds
Chimpanzees
Cognition
Cognition - physiology
Crows
Crows - physiology
Expectancy Violation
Experimentation
Female
Humans
Infancy
Male
Materials
Photic Stimulation
Random Allocation
Reasoning
Rooks
Support
Videotape Recording
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Summary:Some corvids have demonstrated cognitive abilities that rival or exceed those of the great apes; for example, tool use in New Caledonian crows, and social cognition, episodic-like memory and future planning in Western scrub-jays. Rooks appear to be able to solve novel tasks through causal reasoning rather than simple trial-and-error learning. Animals with certain expectations about how objects interact would be able to narrow the field of candidate causes substantially, because some causes are simply 'impossible'. Here we present evidence that rooks hold such expectations and appear to possess perceptual understanding of support relations similar to that demonstrated by human babies, which is more comprehensive than that of chimpanzees.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
1471-2945
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2009.1456