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August 30th, 2024

Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

Recent research shows hooded crows can create mental templates, a skill previously thought unique to humans, suggesting widespread cognitive abilities among corvids and potential for cumulative culture in non-human animals.

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Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

Recent research has revealed that crows, particularly hooded crows, possess cognitive abilities previously thought to be unique to humans. A study conducted by researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University and the University of Bristol demonstrated that these crows can create mental templates, allowing them to remember the shape and size of an object after it has been removed. This skill enables them to reproduce similar objects, a capability that may enhance their tool-making skills and contribute to their survival. The study involved training three hooded crows to recognize colored paper of various sizes and rewarding them for matching scraps to the original templates. The findings suggest that the ability to form mental templates may be more widespread among corvids and could indicate a shared evolutionary trait among various bird species. The research also highlights the potential for cumulative culture in non-human animals, as young crows learn tool-making by observing and stealing from their parents. Understanding these cognitive processes in crows can provide insights into the nature of intelligence across the animal kingdom.

- Hooded crows can create mental templates, a skill once thought unique to humans.

- The ability to form mental templates may be widespread among corvids and other bird species.

- Young crows learn tool-making by stealing and using their parents' tools.

- The study suggests potential for cumulative culture in non-human animals.

- Insights from crow intelligence research can enhance understanding of animal cognition.

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AI: What people are saying
The comments reflect a diverse range of perspectives on the intelligence of crows and other animals, emphasizing their cognitive abilities and social behaviors.
  • Many commenters share personal anecdotes highlighting crows' intelligence and social interactions, reinforcing the idea that they possess advanced cognitive skills.
  • There is a discussion about the broader implications of animal intelligence, with some arguing that intelligence is not exclusive to humans and exists on a continuum across species.
  • Several comments critique the perception of animal intelligence, suggesting that humans often underestimate or misinterpret animal behaviors.
  • Some commenters express a sense of wonder and respect for crows, advocating for kindness towards them and recognizing their complex social structures.
  • There are calls for further exploration of animal cognition, with suggestions that understanding non-human intelligence could lead to insights about our own species.
Link Icon 57 comments
By @milleramp - 6 months
When I was little I had a small bb gun and would shoot cans in the backyard. A couple times i shot a crow and it would bounce off their strong chest and they would fly off seemingly unfazed. One time by pure chance I hit a crow in the neck and it died instantly, crashing down into my neighbor's yard. It was very shocking because I had not killed anything like that before. Immediately crows started circling my parents house, making an incredible amount of noise. I was so scared, I jumped over the fence to retrieve the dead crow. At this point crows started to dive bomb me and I thought for sure the whole neighborhood must know what is going on. I buried the crow in the backyard and the crows continued to be in high places around the house making noises until evening. The coordination and the intentional effort they made to disrupt and stop me was something I have never forgotten. This had a big effect on me, I thought of it's family, and how they were trying to protect it. Needless to say I have not shot another bird since.
By @azemetre - 6 months
I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece.

One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce.

Probably the funniest thing they saw in weeks.

By @jimmytucson - 6 months
The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings.

The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including:

    the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task,
…etc.

The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users).

The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline.

Here’s the actual paper, which as usual, is more substantive than the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6

By @lr4444lr - 6 months
Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF send/receive devices"
By @dilawar - 6 months
Here are a few cultures bits about crows from a village in Northern India.

- If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors.

- During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows.

I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch.

While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest.

I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.

By @jumploops - 6 months
> This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present.

As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?

By @teleforce - 6 months
Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body:

Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of my brother?” So he became regretful.

https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/31

By @bane - 6 months
I think I've come to an inevitable conclusion that there appears to be at least two "sources" of intelligence, genetic, and (I guess for lack of a better word), "learned". Learned could mean all kinds of things, the capacity measurement of IQ, the effort by parents to fill that capacity, social normative steering, whatever.

But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I live in an area with lots of deer, so I get a first-hand chance to observe them).

Suppose a sci-fi story, where humans encounter a fantastically advanced alien species. Over the course of the story events occur where individuals in the alien species see not learn anything at all, while later generations seem imbued with those same learnings. What humans are encountering might be instead incredibly advance, and highly encoded instinct.

Is that not intelligence?

I'm reminded of the schools of buddhism, where a differentiation is that you are able to achieve enlightenment in one-lifetime or in many.

The main distinction between life and non-life appear to be the ability to experience the universe. A blade of grass is alive no different than a human, but entirely different from a rock. Experience seems to be some kind of basis for intelligence, without which it cannot exist, thus perhaps, all experiential beings are intelligent in some way.

Every living thing has survived everything its ancestors' environment threw at them and made it to "now".

By @jeffiel - 6 months
Timely! https://theonion.com/study-crows-intelligent-enough-to-steal...
By @textlapse - 6 months
How cool would it be to have a reinforcement learning playground to teach ‘crows’ and ‘octopuses’ and ‘cuttlefish’?

The key thing is the biological evolution that seeks rewards for survival and reproductive partner selection over generations.

Forget AGI… this would be way cooler to try.

By @rsync - 6 months
What if they’re all, by our own definition, intelligent…

… but what makes us special is that we’re the only ones who care ?

What if ego is the unique human trait?

What if the reason my goats don’t communicate with me isn’t because they’re dumb… but because they couldn’t care less ?

By @14 - 6 months
I have always loved crows. I used to carry a bag of unshelled peanuts in my car to feed to them if I saw them. One day I was pulled over and saw a lone crow. So I threw a peanut and watched him open it easily with his beak and eat the nuts. Then I threw 2 peanuts and he picked up both in it's mouth and flew a short distance away and ate them. I always new crows could fit 2 peanuts but not 3 so I thought what would you do if I throw 3? So I do and for a moment he tries to fit all of them in his mouth but can not. So he flies about 15 feet away to a cement path walkway and on the side of it I watched him bury one of the peanuts. Smart I thought. Then he immediately flew back and grab the other nuts. I have always been impressed by that moment.
By @nikolay - 6 months
There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.
By @squidbeak - 6 months
Compare with the significantly more limited brains and existences of the idiots who massacre them as a hobby.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/misguided-slaug...

By @keiferski - 6 months
I have watched crows wait at stoplights in order to cross the road, even when flying over it would have taken a few seconds. It’s funny how the sign of intelligence in this case was laziness.
By @cyberax - 6 months
I have crows nesting in a tree just outside my house. Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time. Several months ago, they started to look a bit frazzled, they have chicks growing up. So I started giving them bits of food (meats and thawed mice).

They are now bringing me pieces of colored glass :) They also caw if I wave at them.

They are also keeping pigeons and seaguls away.

By @Aleksdev - 6 months
I would not be surprised if the average crow is as smart or smarter than some people I have met in my life.
By @keepamovin - 6 months
The title should be humans are dumber than we thought (compared to crows | for thinking crows weren't as smart as they are ) hahaha! :)
By @ehnto - 6 months
Make sure you are kind to our crow friends, judging by the trajectory of these articles I fear their intelligence is growing as fast as ours is dropping.

While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.

By @omnee - 6 months
We have come a long way from Descartes argument that animals are no more than automata. Which supported our unabashed exploitation of countless species.

It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best.

Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.

By @esquivalience - 6 months
> "Conflict of interest All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest."

Glad to see this in the original article. I had been wondering whether they were in the pocket of Big Crow.

By @nunez - 6 months
This isn't surprising. Birds are incredibly intelligent, and crows/ravens are up there. Magpies too. We have grackles here in Houston; those fuckers are clever as well!
By @imoverclocked - 6 months
This is just as interesting as any other article on finding that X can do Y where X isn’t human and Y is a behavior that humans value.

What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?

By @picafrost - 6 months
We put a lot of effort and funding into trying to contact other intelligent lifeforms in this universe. Why should we believe we can understand each other if we can't even understand the intelligent lifeforms right next to us?
By @ggm - 6 months
The article could be clearer how many shapes they had to train to and something like complexity eg vertex count. A triangle and a square can be a judgement call when you're using your beak to tear it off.

I'd worry "eh good enough" is distorting the outcome.

By @lifeisstillgood - 6 months
I think there is an intelligence / co-operation grid where low intelligence high co-operation gets you herd like protective nature but crows aren’t great on co-operation - not at herd scale

Intelligent sparrows though - that would be deeply scary

By @erikaww - 6 months
hand fed a crow hot cheetos right outside the palace of fine arts. good times.
By @nforgerit - 6 months
I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows.

I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.

By @TomMasz - 6 months
Corvids and parrots upended our beliefs about bird intelligence and made us realize there's more than one way to organize a brain. We still have a lot to learn about them.
By @naikrovek - 6 months
I don’t know why these things are surprising.

To me, the assumption that animals can’t do things we later discovered they could do is the surprising thing. Such arrogance we humans have.

By @RcouF1uZ4gsC - 6 months
I think there are two things that are true:

1. Non-human animals have intelligence and are not “stupid” or automatons.

2. Human intelligence is just so much at an another level that it isnt even close.

By @DiscourseFan - 6 months
Yes, but how can we develop the next killer app for crows?
By @brcmthrowaway - 6 months
What is the difference between a raven and crow?
By @jackmalpo - 6 months
There will be an X is smarter than we thought post about every single species until we realize that every living thing is smart
By @auraai - 6 months
Their intelligence was clear to me growing up around them, without knowing anything about crows specifically. They clearly have intelligent interactions with each other and the environment, and have a "theory of mind" of people approaching them/interacting with them. They could also figure out how to open/untie garbage bags, gang up to bully other birds and take their food, etc. In the mornings, right outside our house, they would congregate on a tall pine tree and it really looked like they were having a daily standup - one of them yells loudly, others listen silently, then start making noise together :)
By @mensetmanusman - 6 months
Apparently you can scare a few of them like crazy from your land and they will tell their bros to stay away.
By @coding123 - 6 months
https://crowpro.net/

(kitboga related)

By @ProAm - 6 months
Adam Carolla did this research in the 90's on Love Lines...I'll die on this hill.
By @nonotanymore - 6 months
The imprinting seems like a drawback if it can't be changed in new environments.
By @moi2388 - 6 months
Seriously animal researchers are so weird..

Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with?

It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities

By @t-3 - 6 months
Crows are definitely smart, but I've seen other birds outsmarting them before. It seems to me that social behavior is a bit overweighted when it comes to attempting to measure animal intelligence.
By @29athrowaway - 6 months
Never piss off a crow for sure.
By @naveen99 - 6 months
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By @wileydragonfly - 6 months
And if you split their tongues, according to family lore, they can talk.
By @tux1968 - 6 months
Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates:

Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky.

When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place.

I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.

By @leshokunin - 6 months
We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well.

Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child.

Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.

By @tomrod - 6 months
Neat!
By @tonetegeatinst - 6 months
My next AI prediction will be that the next big leap will use crows intelligence in problem solving to advance towards AGI
By @theflyingpigeon - 6 months
This is interesting. However, too bad a British university is working with a russian university
By @fn-mote - 6 months
> Researchers have not yet determined whether mental templates related to tool making remain flexible

This quote shows the arrogance mentioned in one of the other comments. A 15 year old crow is somehow going to make a "mental template" that is then as firmly entrenched as a young bird learning the wrong mating song? Nah....

By @mewpmewp2 - 6 months
We consider this smart and intelligent, but many people don't want to admit that LLMs are intelligent?