Crows are known to be intelligent – birds can use tools and understand the concept of zero.Now, scientists
Researchers have found that ravens canto distinguish between paired elements hidden in larger sequences, this cognitive ability is known as recursion. Consider the sentence: "The cat that the dog was chasing meowed." Most adults will quickly figure out that it was the cat meowing and the dog chasing the cat. The ability to combine elements such as "cat" with "meow" and "dog" with "chase" in a sentence or any sequence was once thought to be a unique human trait. It turned out it wasn't.
In 2020, scientists tested the ability of young children and monkeys to recognize patterns. Now biologists have tested the ravens.
As part of the experiment, the researchers trained two ravens (Corvus corone) to recognize the characters { }, [ ] and < >.They rewarded them only when the birds pecked at them in a recursive sequence built into the center, for example{ ( ) } or ( { } ).It took the ravens about a week to do this, and then they passed the "final exams": they were shown chains of similar symbols that they had not yet seen, for exampleHumans, toddlers, and monkeys, when confronted with such a test, usually realize that if { ( ) } is true, then { [ ] } or [ { } ] is true.
As for the crows, they not only coped withalmost as good on tests as preschoolers, but outperformed monkeys. In a previous study, children chose the correct structure with nested center 43% of the time; and monkeys 26% of the time. In the course of a new experiment, the crows "pecked right" in 40% of cases.
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