Crows smarter than Chimps?

[n2doc]

Crows make monkeys out of chimps in mental test
00:01 17 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young

Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps.

Alex Taylor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his team presented six New Caledonian crows with a series of "trap-tube" tests.

A choice morsel of food was placed in a horizontal Perspex tube, which also featured two round holes in the underside, with Perspex traps below.

For most of the tests, one of the holes was sealed, so the food could be dragged across it with a stick and out of the tube to be eaten. The other hole was left open, trapping the food if the crows moved it the wrong way.

Three of the crows solved the task consistently, even after the team modified the appearance of the equipment. This suggested that these crows weren't using arbitrary features – such as the colour of the rim of a hole – to guide their behaviour. Instead they seemed to understand that if they dragged food across a hole, they would lose it.
more:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14745-crows-make-monkeys-out-of-chimps-in-mental-test.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news3_head_dn14745

[melody]

1. We should always remember the Clever Hans effect

... which probably should also be considered regarding the people at Fox News, too ...

but this is still very impressive stuff.

[semillama]

2. The New Caledonian Crows are also the species which demonstrated foresight

These are the birds (well, probably not the same birds as this experiment)that were part of an experiment in tool use. Little cameras were attached to the underside of the crows, which revealed that not only did the crows use sticks as tools, they would carry a particularly useful stick with them from place to place, which is an indication that the birds anticipated using it in the future. That's a pretty huge feat of cognition right there. Bird brains are wired much differently than mammals, and it's looking like a small brain size isn't as big a deal for cognitive ability in these birds as compared to mammals.