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Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

newscientist.com

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Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

#11

Post by grasshopperpurp »

new299 wrote: post #6
qb45 wrote: post #3

TL;DR Researchers trained ravens to exchange some tokens for food. Presented with a choice of 15 different objects, majority of the birds picked the food tokens and stashed them for up to 17 hours until an opportunity for exchange came again. The author believes this passes as the pinnacle of a 4 year old's planning abilities.

I'm kind of used to New Scientist misreporting my own and others research. If someone has a link to the original study I'd be interested in taking a look. Overall, is it really useful to compare Ravens and human children for their long term planning ability? Human children are still under the care of their parents. There's no real pressure on them to store food tokens...

I believe this is the link you're looking for (haven't read it yet, but I did verify that the full text is available):

A raven's memories are for the future

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/126

When searching, I also found this, which I missed the first time around, and it might be interesting to some:

Subadult ravens generally don't transfer valuable tokens to conspecifics when there is nothing to gain for themselves

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484978/

Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

#12

Post by lostlogin »

Raphmedia wrote: post #10
unit91 wrote: post #9

I have a 3 year old who has all kinds of plans for Christmas. I seriously doubt a Raven is capable of that.

Indeed. Raven are not very much religious and don't tend to celebrate religious holidays.

They do hunt, sometimes as a group, but they are not a bird of pray.

Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

#13

Post by Retric »

ljf wrote: post #7

I had a pet magpie as a child and in the short time we had it it was clear it was such an intelligent creature. Its nest had fallen from a tree in a storm - we found it a day or so later in a not great state. But within a day of feeding it was hand tame and happily came to live in the house. By the end of the summer though it learnt the skills it needed and flew off. While it lived with us it quickly learnt the place…

That's really interesting.

As a kid I once rescued a humming bird that got tangled in a spiders web. I walked around with it for a few minutes and carefully cleaned the web off. Then suddenly after realizing it was ok. The bird was all too happy to fly off.

It must have been fun to have a bird stick around like that.

Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

#18

Post by conductr »

ljf wrote: post #7

I had a pet magpie as a child and in the short time we had it it was clear it was such an intelligent creature. Its nest had fallen from a tree in a storm - we found it a day or so later in a not great state. But within a day of feeding it was hand tame and happily came to live in the house. By the end of the summer though it learnt the skills it needed and flew off. While it lived with us it quickly learnt the place…

I have a similar story of taking in an orphaned baby deer as a kid. It was like one of our pet dogs. Our pet dogs even kind of adopted the deer as part of their pack. I think we only had it for ~6 months although it felt like a long time.

Thanks for sparking that memory, I hadn't thought of that in ages.

Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can

#20

Post by pharrington »

Raphmedia wrote: post #10
unit91 wrote: post #9

I have a 3 year old who has all kinds of plans for Christmas. I seriously doubt a Raven is capable of that.

Indeed. Raven are not very much religious and don't tend to celebrate religious holidays.

You don't know that.
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