Clever Corvids: analytic thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 10, 2015, 19:43 (3574 days ago) @ David Turell

Crows can do it:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-understand-analogies/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20150210-"Then, the critical test was given. Each card now pictured a pair of items. The middle card would display pairs AA or CD, and the two side cards would display pair BB and pair EF. The relation between one pair of items must be appreciated and then applied to a new pair of items to generate the correct answer: the BB card in the case of AA or the EF card in the case of CD. For instance, if the middle card displayed a circle and a cross, then the correct choice would be the side card containing a square and a triangle rather than the side card containing two squares.-"Not only could the crows correctly perform this task, but they did so spontaneously, from the very first presentations, without ever being trained to do so.-"It seems that initial training to match identical items enabled the crows to grasp a broadly applicable concept of sameness that could apply to the novel two-item analogy task. Such robust and uninstructed behavior represents the most convincing evidence yet of analogical reasoning in a non-primate animal, as only apes had spontaneously shown analogical reasoning after learning to match identical items."