“Claiming that […] only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told NPR. “Because we have at least the crow [also].”
It’s a bold claim – no other non-human animal has ever been shown to possess this ability – but the evidence adds up. “We trained two carrion crows to detect a distinct display among two-dimensional visual shapes,” explain Nieder and his colleagues in their new paper on corvids’ math ability.
“The crows were presented with a stimulus array of six simultaneously displayed shapes and had to peck on the outlier (the ‘intruder’) that differed in visual parameters compared to the remaining five base stimuli,” they write. “The crows successfully applied the general principle of detecting intruders to new stimuli, including simple polygon shapes.”
Basically, it was a special crow video game – with added mealworms. A screen displayed six shapes, one of which was different from the others – “Initially we presented some very obviously different figures,” Nieder told NPR. “For instance, five moons and one flower.”
The crows’ task was to peck at the right – which is to say, the wrong – picture. Get it correct, and they’d get their tasty reward.
In a testament to the crows’ intelligence (or perhaps just the deliciousness of mealworms), the birds all caught on impressively quickly. But for the test proper, the task would become a little more difficult: out were the flowers and moons; in their place were squares, rhombi, isotrapezoids, and other various quadrilaterals.
Could you beat the bird brains?
The birds, though, were undaunted. The crows “were able to spontaneously detect the intruder the first time they were tested with purely quadrilateral shapes,” the paper reports, with a success rate significantly higher than random chance.
“They could tell us, for instance, if they saw a figure that was just not a square, slightly skewed, among all the other squares,” Nieder told Scientific American. “They really could do this spontaneously [and] discriminate the outlier shapes based on the geometric differences without us needing them to train them additionally.”
Even their failures hinted at a belied intelligence, echoing in some cases the types of mistakes made by certain human cultures. It’s overall an incredible discovery, and one that has surprised even scientists working in the same area: “Baboons are so much closer to us, and we trained them so much more,” Mathias Sablé-Meyer, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who recently led a similar geometry-based study in that species, told NPR.
“After failing to train the baboons to do it, I wouldn’t have expected crows to do it.”
Still, as sophisticated as these geometrical skills may be, Nieder believes crows are unlikely to be the only animal to possess them.
“All these capabilities, at the end of the day, from a biological point of view, have evolved because they provide a survival advantage or a reproductive advantage,” he told Scientific American. Birds may have comparatively simple brain setups, but evidently they make it work: “these animals are terribly intelligent,” Nieder said, “so, obviously, evolution found two different ways of giving rise to behaviorally flexible animals.”
So, which other animals might be acing math tests in secret? We don’t know of any yet – but according to Nieder, they’ve gotta be out there.
“I would never dare to say that this is the only species,” he told NPR. “[We’re] just now opening this field of investigation.”
The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Source Link: Crows Once Again Prove Their Braininess By Conquering Geometry
