Is that why my 4 year old keeps saying "nevermore"?
Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#22Not a raven, but you can see a sample of bird planning in this funny video
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#23I'll believe that when a raven starts tenaciously suggesting we go for ice cream any time we are even discussing the possibility of being anywhere close to the ice cream shop.
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#24Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#25I 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.
Serious question (I don't know that I know any atheists): do atheists not eat ham and turkey, and give their kids presents on Christmas? I would have thought this was more cultural than religious in the USA.
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#26Is that why my 4 year old keeps saying "nevermore"?
Be very concerned if the child starts hearing heartbeats from under the floorboards.
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#27There was a great episode of PBS' Nature on corvids' cognitive abilities and tool use:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/ravens-discover-the-brainpowe...
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Raven are not very much religious and don't tend to celebrate religious holidays.
Serious question (I don't know that I know any atheists): do atheists not eat ham and turkey, and give their kids presents on Christmas? I would have thought this was more cultural than religious in the USA.
Since when is ham and turkey associated with Christmas? I’ve never heard of this.
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for the links. If the first link is what they're referring too, then it's a pretty dumb headline.
That article is a non-peer reviewed perspective on some recent research. To provide background they make a throw away comment about some work done in 2007 [1] and say it's kind of similar to what you see in 4 year old children (in another study).
The original researchers don't seem to have made that statement, or attempted to support it. So... par for the course for New Scientist I guess...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17314979?access_num=1731...
Re: Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
#30I 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.
It really was - they were properly part of the family for a few months - and it used to go out and play in the garden and come back in the house when it was ready to rest or hungry - at first we locked it in a cage at night but soon we didn't, and it was very happy.
But for ages it couldn't feed itself and relied on me dropping cat food into its open beak with tweezers - I'm pretty sure it did this longer than it would in the wild. Then one day when it was playing in the garden it learnt how to catch worms and insects, and then the next day it started drinking from puddles and then the next day it just flew away.
It might have returned, but to be honest even then it would have been hard to recognise amongst other magpies - but it never tried to come in the house again, even though we left the doors open.
For a few years after (and even now to be honest) I sometimes shout 'Marilyn' when I see magpies - hoping it will recognise me ;) (we chose 'Marilyn' as I'd recently read it was historically a mans name, so I thought it was good to choose something gender neutral)