Crows are capable of causal reasoning Bashny.Net

New Caledonian crows, seeing a moving object, you know that there is someone moving it.

The ability to make causal inferences is inherent not only to humans, but birds and new Caledonian crows. Worked with them the new Zealand zoologists from Auckland University explained his choice by the fact that these crows can use tools like one of the birds. That is, according to scientists, they can see in the manipulation of an inanimate object causal chain between the subject and those who he manipulates.

For the experiment, caught a few birds of different ages and put them in a large outdoor aviary. The food they put in a special box from which it can be obtained using a thin rod. Within a few days the crows mastered the method of obtaining treats. Then near the feeding place, the researchers put the screen with the hole in which it was possible to stick the stick. Moving the stick reach the place where Raven manipulated the twig. What is important, because the screen was impossible to see who this stick moves.





Further events developed in two directions. In one case, the birds saw a man who had disappeared behind the screen, after which the hole appeared a stick and several times moved back and forth, then the man came out from behind the screen. In another case, the ravens watched only a stick, which moved the same number of times as in the first case, but the man never appeared. In both cases, once the stick has stopped moving, birds flew to the feeder and began to get a treat. However, as the researchers write in the journal PNAS, if the ravens had not seen the man, and saw only moving the stick, they showed a strong concern and all the while trying to keep the hole for the stick in sight.

It turns out the crows were afraid that they will bother you only in the case if you assumed some kind of hidden strength hiding behind a screen. If this "hidden power", I mean the man went outside, the birds calmed down: sticks could not be afraid. Or, in other words, the ravens knew that there must be someone who moves the stick, and while they had remained hidden, obscure, should be alert.





These data are again forced to think about how evolved brain and mental faculties in the animal world. Similar experiments with children have shown that they begin to suspect the "agent of action" to only seven months of age. Therefore, we can say that new Caledonian crows are on the level of development of the seven-month-old baby. On the other hand, parrots Jaco they are far away: in a recent study, Jaco has shown mental abilities that a person has only to third year of life.



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