(Image courtesy Pixabay)
(LIVE SCIENCE) – Crows are notoriously clever — the songbirds can use tools, understand the concept of zero and follow basic analogies. Now, a new study suggests that their grasp of one complex cognitive principle in particular is better than that of monkeys and comparable to that of small children.
Researchers found that crows can distinguish paired elements buried in larger sequences, a cognitive ability known as recursion. Consider the sentence: "The cat the dog chased meowed." Although the sentence is admittedly a grammatical nightmare, most adults would quickly understand that the cat meowed and that the dog chased the cat. This capacity to pair elements like "cat" to "meow" and "dog" to "chase" in a sentence, or any sequence, was once thought to be a uniquely human trait.
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The new study, however, suggests that crows can do it too. And this latest research builds on previous work demonstrating the existence of recursive reasoning among monkeys. "One of the most distinguishing features of human communicative cognition may turn out not to be that human-specific after all," lead author Diana A. Liao, a postdoctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
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