I wonder is the result owes a lot to visual processing (a highly developed trait in most birds.) Arguably, with the symbol-pairs used here, each pair look a bit like a single but partially-obscured convex object, with the inner ones lying on top of the outer ones.
Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#32> Some scientists remain skeptical. Arnaud Rey, a senior researcher in psychology at the French National Center for Scientific Research, says the findings can still be interpreted from a simple associative learning standpoint—in which an animal learns to link one symbol to the next, such as connecting an open bracket with a closed one. A key reason, he explains, lies in a feature of the study design: the researchers…
I thought what followed was equally thought-provoking: "In Rey’s view, the notion of “recursive processing” as a unique form of cognition is in itself flawed. Even in humans, he says, this capacity can most likely be explained simply through associative learning mechanisms..." AFAIK, this contrasts quite markedly with Chomsky's position that recursion is central to his universal grammar.
Yes, as usual, our pop science writer with a dim understanding of the issue quotes critics of the Chomskyan paradigm (the study aims to falsify Chomsky’s suspicion that a symbolic operation called “merge” gives humans a unique capacity for deep recursion) and for balance quotes other critics of the Chomskyan paradigm - and never do we hear from the syntacticians (who study recursive grammatical structure as a career).
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#33I feed the crows cashews as I walk the dog, and I find their behavior fascinating. They "commute to work" each day. Crows all live in a community that they go home to each night, and then each morning they all come back to their specific areas, usually in pairs. If you're in a place where you see crows every day, it's almost certainly the same pair of crows you’re seeing each day. Each pair has a strict territory. I…
Around where I live (southern New York), the crows seem to gather in groups of twenty or so as sunset approaches, and appear to be socializing (and making quite a lot of noise in the process.) There does not seem to be any fixed location where this happens, and it seems different from when they are mobbing a raptor, where the target of their ire can quickly be seen from the way the crows are directing their attention…
It looks like there’s a pod in Poughkeepsie, but it’s an annual gathering place rather than nightly?
https://www.scenichudson.org/viewfinder/poughkeepsies-massiv...
Some other reporting about crows in your neck of the woods:
https://www.ithaca.com/news/seeing-spots-nope-those-are-crow...
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#34Not surprising. Crows around here are always making a Racket.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#35So, crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and elephants… let’s just be thankful that all of the other smart animals can’t manipulate their environments at scale.
if you look at all those groups you can kind of see what each lacks compared to humans to get runaway intelligence benefits that basically create a continuous selective effect for more intelligence.
humans have a solid combination of dexterity, life span, and verbal communication. Dexterity allows for manipulation that allows intelligence to be used to maximum effect in an environment, life span allows for time to learn and share knowledge, and verbal communication allows to share knowledge effectively which allows group work and knowledge to pass through generations.
crows and elephants seem to be the most limited by lack of dexterity, crows actually try to use tools to get around the limitation. If Elephants had some octopus style multi-trunk tentacles that could be used like hands they'd be set I think
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#36Crow Recursion is the name of my new nerdcore death metal band
"Crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your face if you mess up the END CONDIIITTTTIIIIOOONNN!
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you manage to get started? The crows close to me are so skittish that if I try to throw a peanut at them they just fly off and never come back. I've only managed to not have that happen once.
Crows are companions-to-hunters (wolves and humans mostly.) They interpret your behavior through that "lens". If you set out food and then watch them that means (in crow) that you are a hunter, and a lousy one, and you're trying to hunt them . Toss out some food and "forget" it and they'll think you're such a successful hunter that you don't even need to every scrap. Someone worth knowing. In the old days, crows woul…
I love this. Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them? Or is this more of a human desire. It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#38We know that crows and many other animals use tools, which represents at least one level of linguistic abstraction ("It's not just a rock, it's a member of a more general category of things capable of smashing open food").
I've always thought that recursion, specifically the ability to apply abstraction to itself, was a unique human trait. We don't just abstract one level, we keep going - building tools that help us build tools, building social structures that facilitate the production of these meta-tools, etc.
So while we see other animals using tools that they find in their environment, I don't know of any evidence that they recurse on that, i.e. they always use tools for their primary purpose but never engage in systematic production of tools, or tools that make other tools. But given this article, maybe it's not mental capacity or linguistic recursion that limits tool making but something more mechanical like simply dexterity?
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#39Chomsky would be surprised
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#40We know that crows and many other animals use tools, which represents at least one level of linguistic abstraction ("It's not just a rock, it's a member of a more general category of things capable of smashing open food"). I've always thought that recursion, specifically the ability to apply abstraction to itself, was a unique human trait. We don't just abstract one level, we keep going - building tools that help us…
One comment, re: tools to build tools. I've seen animals use rocks, in videos, to debark sticks, to be used to perform another task.
That's a tool to make a tool, and I bet there are other cases.
In fact, I recall a video of a monkey, using a sharpened stone, to break the window of its habitat. To sharpen the stone, it used something else (the video did not say anything other than the monkey sharpened the stone).
So that is another case.