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Crows are even smarter than we thought

nautil.us

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Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#61

Post by azemetre »

I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece.

One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce.

Probably the funniest thing they saw in weeks.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#62

Post by jimmytucson »

The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings.

The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including:

    the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task,
…etc.

The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users).

The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline.

Here’s the actual paper, which as usual, is more substantive than the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#63

Post by sfink »

Retr0id wrote: post #42
jumploops wrote: post #22

> This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present. As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?

I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose) I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference.

I'm not a very good artist, so it'll always look kind of bad, though oddly it doesn't feel like aphantasia is all that much of an obstacle to my ability to draw. It's more just skill in making things look "right", skill that is learnable and seems like is necessary to learn by anyone, include those without aphantasia.

It's difficult to communicate to someone without aphantasia, because to them apparently the memory of what something looks like is an image. It's similar to the question about whether I dream in color. I mean, I dream in color just as much as I read in color. If asked, I could tell you what color something is. It's part of my knowledge of what that thing looks like. But knowing what color something is and seeing the thing in color are definitely not the same. I don't dream in images at all. I certainly don't dream in "black and white". Colors and grayscales only have meaning in an image.

(And maybe it's just me, but if the color of something never strikes me as an important characteristic, I will have no memory of what color the thing is. Right now, I couldn't tell you what color the walls of the next room over are, despite seeing it every day. Even though I could probably roughly model the entire room and get the dimensions and positions of everything about right.)

Though I'm skeptical that "normal" people are as restricted to images as their descriptions often imply. Not everything is 2D, so memories are going to have to include at least some shape information. And I'm sure you have all kinds of associations of the texture and feel of things you visualize, and if it's prickly how much it would hurt to bump into it or hold it in your hand. Memories are rich multi-sensory things, and they aren't just limited to point-in-time sensations either.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#64

Post by meowface »

azemetre wrote: post #61

I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece. One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in…

They probably have rich social lives. I wonder how fine-grained their communication signals are.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#65

Post by bigyikes »

sfink wrote: post #63
Retr0id wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose) I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference. I'm not a very good…

Interestingly, your description of remembering what something looks like matches my experience exactly, but in my dreams I see vividly. Aphantasic except in my dreams?

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#66

Post by mikestew »

cduzz wrote: post #56
jiggawatts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.

A friend used to jog around the university I worked at; he'd jog past an area that, for a month out of the year, was under a hawk nest. He came by commenting that he'd been dive-bombed by a hawk that was obviously guarding it's nest he said it had bonked him on the head and yelled at him -- he decided not to go jogging that way for a while after. I was kinda impressed that the hawk had "bonk human on head" mode as we…

I've had owls do the same thing, and thankfully without talons in full attack mode. "Aggressive owls" weren't a thing I recall growing up in the Midwest, but they're sure in the Pacific Northwest.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#67

Post by cabbageicefruit »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #47
tetrisgm wrote: post #33

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well. Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child. Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between hum…

Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence” The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implic…

> However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses

What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else?

I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#68

Post by Terretta »

jumploops wrote: post #22

> This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present. As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?

As another, I thought "mental template" is the perfect term, since it's neither image nor visual.

I assume (since you mention points), you can recreate a geometric drawing (say, a floor plan, or a bicycle*)? What would you call that if not drawing from a mental template?

* It seems, at least with bicycles, some people who do this "visually" are terrible at it: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definite... ... I look at those, and think, how T.F. do they think that would work? Then I realize they aren't thinking how it works to draw it, they are drawing what they see and they don't look at things closely enough to understand their shape.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#69

Post by cabbageicefruit »

Flop7331 wrote: post #41
teleforce wrote: post #26

Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body: Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of…

To be fair to Cain/Qabil, he didn't know ambushing Abel/Habil was going to kill him. Nobody had died before.

Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#70

Post by tbrownaw »

sfink wrote: post #63
Retr0id wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose) I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.

As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference. I'm not a very good…

> is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like

Is this similar to calling an .svg "not an image" if it's viewed in a text editor rather than on a canvas?

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