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Bird Brains (Avian Intelligence)

Newly published research results suggest young ravens exhibit cognitive skills rivaling those of adult great apes.
Young Ravens Could Have Cognitive Skills That Rival Adult Great Apes, Research Finds

It's safe to say if there was a Mensa for animals, corvids would be crowing about it. They can plan like us, make tools like us, and might even be consciously judging us for all we know. We get it, they're super smart.

Just to rub it in, there's now evidence that their cognitive development might even be a little quicker than ours. Hand-raised common ravens (Corvus corax) have all their mental skills by just four months of age, all without watching a single episode of Sesame Street.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Ornithology and Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany ran eight ravens in their care through a modified version of the Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB) every four months since hatching.

This series of tests doesn't just examine 'thinking' skills to do with spatial relationships, object permanence, causality, and tool use – it deals with social abilities, communication, and theory of mind.

They compared the birds' results with data gathered previously on primates, including results on chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), as well as parrots.

They found by just four months of age, the ravens already had the social and other cognitive skills expected of an adult raven. This is in spite of having a brain that wasn't yet fully grown.

Since these skills are comparable with those of a great apes', it means ravens that are barely able to fly can already solve problems that would make an orangutan scratch its head in deep thought.

FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/young-...at-rival-cognitive-skills-of-adult-great-apes

See Also:
Young Ravens Rival Adult Chimps in a Big Test of General Intelligence
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...chimps-in-a-big-test-of-general-intelligence/
 
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Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published report on raven intelligence. The full paper is accessible at the link below.

Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills
Simone Pika, Miriam Jennifer Sima, Christian R. Blum, Esther Herrmann & Roger Mundry
Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 20617 (2020)

Abstract
Human children show unique cognitive skills for dealing with the social world but their cognitive performance is paralleled by great apes in many tasks dealing with the physical world. Recent studies suggested that members of a songbird family—corvids—also evolved complex cognitive skills but a detailed understanding of the full scope of their cognition was, until now, not existent. Furthermore, relatively little is known about their cognitive development. Here, we conducted the first systematic, quantitative large-scale assessment of physical and social cognitive performance of common ravens with a special focus on development. To do so, we fine-tuned one of the most comprehensive experimental test-batteries, the Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB), to raven features enabling also a direct, quantitative comparison with the cognitive performance of two great ape species. Full-blown cognitive skills were already present at the age of four months with subadult ravens’ cognitive performance appearing very similar to that of adult apes in tasks of physical (quantities, and causality) and social cognition (social learning, communication, and theory of mind). These unprecedented findings strengthen recent assessments of ravens’ general intelligence, and aid to the growing evidence that the lack of a specific cortical architecture does not hinder advanced cognitive skills. Difficulties in certain cognitive scales further emphasize the quest to develop comparative test batteries that tap into true species rather than human specific cognitive skills, and suggest that socialization of test individuals may play a crucial role. We conclude to pay more attention to the impact of personality on cognitive output, and a currently neglected topic in Animal Cognition—the linkage between ontogeny and cognitive performance.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77060-8
 
Newly published research results suggest young ravens exhibit cognitive skills rivaling those of adult great apes.


FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/young-...at-rival-cognitive-skills-of-adult-great-apes

See Also:
Young Ravens Rival Adult Chimps in a Big Test of General Intelligence
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...chimps-in-a-big-test-of-general-intelligence/
They are one smart bird. When I was a kid a friend trained one to talk and it talked - mimicked quite a few words.
 
Newly published research describes the emergence, spread and ramifications of novel effective foraging behavior (the ability to open trash bins) among cockatoos in the Sydney metropolitan area.
Crafty cockatoos master dumpster diving and teach each other

A few years ago, a Sydney scientist noticed a sulfur-crested cockatoo opening his trash bin. ... ornithologist Richard Major was impressed by the ingenuity. ...

Major teamed up with researchers in Germany to study how many cockatoos learned this trick. In early 2018, they found from a survey of residents that birds in three Sydney suburbs had mastered the novel foraging technique. By the end of 2019, birds were lifting bins in 44 suburbs.

“From three suburbs to 44 in two years is a pretty rapid spread,” said Major, who is based at the Australian Museum.

The researchers’ next question was whether the cockatoos had each figured out how to do this alone — or whether they copied the strategy from experienced birds. And their research published Thursday in the journal Science concluded the birds mostly learned by watching their peers. ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/business-science-environment-and-nature-7844af19c7975f12c2a98cc5bd83fb60
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report.

Innovation and geographic spread of a complex foraging culture in an urban parrot
BY BARBARA C. KLUMP, JOHN M. MARTIN, SONJA WILD, JANA K. HÖRSCH, RICHARD E. MAJOR, LUCY M. APLIN
SCIENCE 23 JUL 2021 : 456-460

Abstract
The emergence, spread, and establishment of innovations within cultures can promote adaptive responses to anthropogenic change. We describe a putative case of the development of a cultural adaptation to urban environments: opening of household waste bins by wild sulphur-crested cockatoos. A spatial network analysis of community science reports revealed the geographic spread of bin opening from three suburbs to 44 in Sydney, Australia, by means of social learning. Analysis of 160 direct observations revealed individual styles and site-specific differences. We describe a full pathway from the spread of innovation to emergence of geographic variation, evidencing foraging cultures in parrots and indicating the existence of cultural complexity in parrots. Bin opening is directly linked to human-provided opportunities, highlighting the potential for culture to facilitate behavioral responses to anthropogenic change.

SOURCE: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/456
 
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Newly published research describes the emergence, spread and ramifications of novel effective foraging behavior (the ability to open trash bins) among cockatoos in the Sydney metropolitan area.

FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/business-science-environment-and-nature-7844af19c7975f12c2a98cc5bd83fb60

More on the clever cockatoos.

Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) are so smart they’ve been compared to 3-year-old humans.

But what 3-year-old has made their own cutlery set? Scientists have observed wild cockatoos, members of the parrot family, crafting the equivalent of a crowbar, an ice pick, and a spoon to pry open one of their favorite fruits. This is the first time any bird species has been seen creating and using a set of tools in a specific order—a cognitively challenging behavior previously known only in humans, chimpanzees, and capuchin monkeys.

The work “supports the idea that parrots have a general [type of] intelligence that allows them to innovate creative solutions to the problems they run into in nature,” says Alex Taylor, a biologist who studies New Caledonian crows at the University of Auckland. “[It] establishes this species as one of the avian family’s most proficient wild tool users.”

The discovery happened serendipitously when behavioral ecologist Mark O’Hara was working with wild but captive birds in a research aviary on Yamdena Island in Indonesia. “I’d just turned away, and when I looked back, one of the birds was making and using tools,” says O’Hara, of the Messerli Research Institute. “I couldn’t believe my eyes!”

The Goffin’s cockatoo is known for being a clever and innovative social learner. In captivity, the birds have solved complex puzzle boxes and invented rakelike tools to retrieve objects. Several other birds, including hyacinth macaws and New Caledonian crows, make and use tools in the wild, often to extract food, but none seems to make a set of tools. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/wild-cockatoos-make-their-own-cutlery-sets
 
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