New Discovery Enhances Our Understanding of Crow Intelligence, a Species That Continues to Fascinate Scientists.
The lead author of the study, Diana Liao, a neuroscientist and senior researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany, stated that this research was inspired by how young children learn to count.
Scientists discover crows can “count” from 1 to 4 – (Photo: AI).
Toddlers use numerical words to count the objects in front of them. If they see three toys, their counting may sound like “one, two, three” or “one, one, one.”
To gather stronger evidence for the counting abilities of animals, Liao and her colleagues studied crows, a species known for their remarkable vocalizations and understanding of complex mathematical concepts.
The team trained three carrion crows (Corvus corone) over 160 sessions.
During the training, the crows had to learn to associate a series of visual and auditory signals presented randomly – visual signals being Arabic numerals and auditory signals being sounds from different instruments.
They were taught to recognize that each signal corresponded to a specific number of calls, ranging from one to four. After producing sounds (for example, calling four times for a sound or symbol related to four calls), they would peck at a display screen to indicate they had completed the task.
Diagram illustrating the experiment – (Photo: Liao et al.).
As a result, the researchers found that all three crows could produce the correct number of calls in response to the signals. If there were any errors, they typically occurred between relatively close numbers, such as three and four.
“Our results demonstrate that crows can generate an instructed number of sounds flexibly and intentionally using an ‘approximate number system.’
This ability of crows also reflects the counting skills of toddlers before they learn to understand counting words. This skill lays the groundwork for actual counting, where numbers are part of a composite symbol system,” the researchers wrote.
The study was published in the journal Science.
