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Related article<\/span> Some birds may use \u2018mental time travel,\u2019 study finds<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Maybe crows could do the same, Liao thought. She was inspired, too, by a June 2005 study on chickadees tailoring their alarm calls to a predator\u2019s size. The larger a predator\u2019s wingspan or body length, the fewer \u201cdee\u201d sounds the chickadees used in their alarm call, the study found. The opposite was true for smaller predators \u2013\u2013 the songbirds would use more \u201cdee\u201d sounds if they encountered a smaller bird, which could be greater threats to chickadees since they are more agile, Liao said. <\/p>\n
The authors of the chickadee study couldn\u2019t confirm whether the small songbirds had control over the number of sounds they made or if the number of sounds were an involuntary response. But the possibility piqued Liao\u2019s curiosity \u2013\u2013 could crows, whose intelligence has been well-documented over decades of research, show control over their ability to produce a certain number of sounds, effectively \u201ccounting\u201d like toddlers do? <\/p>\n
Liao and her colleagues trained three carrion crows, a European species closely related to the American crow, over more than 160 sessions. During the trainings, the birds had to learn associations between a series of visual and auditory cues from 1 to 4 and produce the corresponding number of caws. In the example researchers provided, a visual cue might look like a bright blue numeral, and its corresponding audio could be the half-second song of a drumroll. <\/p>\n
The crows were expected to perform the same number of caws as the number represented by the cue \u2013\u2013 three caws for the cue with the numeral 3 \u2013\u2013 within 10 seconds of seeing and hearing the cue. When the birds had stopped counting and cawing, they would peck at an \u201center\u201d key on the touchscreen that presented their cues to confirm that they were done. If the birds had counted correctly, they\u2019d receive a treat. <\/p>\n
It appeared that as the cues continued, the crows took longer to react to each cue. Their reaction times grew as \u201cmore vocalizations were impending,\u201d Liao wrote, suggesting that the crows planned the number of caws they were going to make before they opened their beaks. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Scientists solve giant hummingbird mystery \u2014 with the help of tiny backpacks<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The researchers could even tell how many calls the birds planned to make by the way their first call sounded \u2013\u2013 subtle acoustic differences that showed that the crows knew how many numbers they were looking at and had synthesized the information. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey understand abstract numbers \u2026 and then plan ahead as they match their behavior to match that number,\u201d Williams said. <\/p>\n
Even the mistakes the crows made were somewhat advanced: If the crows had cawed one too many times, stuttered over the same number or submitted their responses with their beak prematurely, Liao and her researchers could detect from the sound of the first call where they went wrong. These are the \u201csame kinds of errors humans make,\u201d Williams said. <\/p>\n
Birds and many other animals were previously thought to make only on-the-spot decisions based on stimuli in their immediate environments, a theory popularized by the 20th century animal behaviorist B.F. Skinner. But the latest research by Liao and her colleagues provides more evidence about crows\u2019 ability to synthesize numbers to produce a sound and suggests that the skill is within their control. <\/p>\n
The study team\u2019s findings are highly specific but still significant \u2013\u2013 they challenge the once common belief that all animals are merely stimulus-response machines, said Kevin McGowan, a researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, who has spent more than two decades studying wild crows in their habitats. McGowan wasn\u2019t involved in the study. <\/p>\n
Crow intelligence has been studied for decades. Scientists have investigated New Caledonian crows creating their own compound tools to access food. The birds appear to establish rules, according to a November 2013 study coauthored by the University of T\u00fcbingen lab\u2019s lead researcher, Andreas Nieder. Crow language has confounded scientists for decades, too, with its widely varying tones and expressions, McGowan said. <\/p>\n
The study by Liao and her colleagues isn\u2019t even the first to consider whether crows can count. That research began with Nicholas Thompson in 1968, animal cognition expert Irene Pepperberg noted. A research professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, Pepperberg is best known for her work with an African grey parrot named Alex. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Parrots can play tablet games for enrichment. Now researchers are studying how to improve them for birds to use<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thompson hypothesized that crows could count based on their caws, the duration and number of which the birds appeared to control in a given burst of sound. The crows\u2019 counting abilities \u201cseem to exceed the demands which survival makes for such abilities,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n
Another University of T\u00fcbingen study on crows\u2019 counting abilities from September 2015 trained the birds to recognize groupings of dots and recorded the activity of neurons in the part of the crows\u2019 brains that receives and makes sense of visual stimuli. The researchers found that the crows\u2019 neurons \u201cignore the dots\u2019 size, shape and arrangement and only extract their number,\u201d the university said in a statement at the time. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, crows\u2019 brains can represent different quantities, and crows can quickly learn to match Arabic numerals to those quantities \u2013\u2013 something humans usually explicitly teach their children,\u201d Williams said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
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Perhaps \u201cbirdbrained\u201d isn\u2019t such an insult after all \u2013\u2013 crows, the ubiquitous urban bird, can vocally count up to four, the latest research has found. Not only can the inquisitive creatures count, but they can match the number of calls they make when shown a numeral, according to a new study, led by a team <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}