Do crows, like humans, have a concept of 'hidden causal agents'?

[muriel_volestrangler]

So far the only animal shown to have the ability infer hidden causal agency is Homo sapiens. A dog lover told me that he’s absolutely sure that dogs can do it (caninophiles attribute all sorts of wisdom to dogs in the absence of any scientific evidence!), but so far there have been no studies demonstrating this.

Such tests are, however, possible. One was recently conducted in New Caledonian crows, Corvus moneduloides. These animals are awesomely smart, and in fact are the only non-human species known to modify non-natural materials in the lab to make tools for procuring food, and to use other tools in ways previously seen only in primates (go here for a good description of three kinds of crow tool-use). Here’s a video of one of these smart beasts figuring out how to retrieve food by bending the tip of a wire into a hook. It’s amazing:

At any rate, a group of researchers at the Universities of Auckland, Cambridge, and Vienna wanted to figure out if these crows had the notion of hidden causal agency. The method was, as the authors note, “to infer what caused an inanimate object to move.” The results, described in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Alex Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell Gray (free access and download at link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/10/1208724109.full.pdf+html ), suggest that crows can indeed infer hidden causal agency.
...
Then, each crow was given three sequential “hidden causal agent” (HCA) trials: a human walked into the room behind the curtain (in all trials there was also another human standing in the corner of the room), and then the stick was pushed through the hole, protruding near the food apparatus, 15 times. (The movement was controlled by pulling strings, usually by someone outside the room, so the stick always moved the same way.) After the crow saw this, the human (and the person in the corner) then left the room, so that the crows could go back to their food-retrieving setup. (They don’t do that when the stick is moving because it could hit them in the head.)
...

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/do-crows-have-a-concept-of-hidden-causal-agents/

[pinto]

1. Thanks for the post. Crows are really intelligent from my casual observance. Don't get the point

of the study here, though. It's about interactions / expectations among the humans and crows, no? Or about a simpler ability to use tools?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. It's about linking a visible event with an agent you can't see

If the crows see the stick moving, without knowing what animal causes it to move, they stay wary of it. If they see someone go behind the curtain, the stick moves, and then they see the person leave, they feel confident that they know the person was moving the stick, and, since they've seen them go, they don't worry about the stick poking them when they get in position to extract the food.

This shows they can attribute the movement of something to another animal that they can't see at the time (and this is not an inherited reflex - they seem to reason this out, because it's not a particularly natural situation).

[pinto]

9. Ah, got it.

[Odin2005]

8. Their smarts are why corvids can be such pests.

If your cat kills a crow it's neighbors will remember that exact cat and if they see it again they will harass it, perhaps even to death.

[Speck Tater]

2. Crows are almost as smart as humans, and much smarter than Republicans. nt

[CrispyQ]

4. I read another study about crows.

They recognize other crows. If a crow hid a treat in front of another crow, it knew which crow had watched it hide the treat. They removed the crow that had witnessed the hiding & the put another crow in the pen. The first crow didn't do anything. When they removed that crow & put the second crow back in, the first crow immediately guarded the hidden treat.

I love crows.

Thanks for posting!

[hedgehog]

5. How did this crow ever figure this out?

[DollarBillHines]

6. It gets better...

Cornell School of Ornithology (I think it was Cornell) conducted an experiment spanning three generations of crows.

Using different students, they would send two students into an environment with crows. The students wore similar masks, very detailed but with minor differences.

One mask would act very aggressively toward the birds and the other mask was passive and would drop food on the floor.

The experiment skipped the next generation and then conducted the same exercise on the third generation.

Guess what happened...

The third-generation birds reacted to the masks exactly as did the first.


I have a friend who has a pet dragonfly that recognizes him and only him.

I have a pet hummingbird that does the same and lives in my house during cold weather.

[Odin2005]

7. I am not suprised, New Caledonian Crows are the smartest birds.

They are certainly as smart as non-human great apes.