Clever Corvids: and others. Chickens! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 04, 2017, 01:03 (2662 days ago) @ David Turell

A review of research finds chickens can be seen as clever:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-016-1064-4

In this paper, I have identified a wide range of scientifically documented examples of complex cognitive, emotional, communicative, and social behavior in domestic chickens which should be the focus of further study. These capacities are, compellingly, similar to what we see in other animals regarded as highly intelligent. They include:
1.
Chickens possess a number of visual and spatial capacities, arguably dependent upon mental representation, such as some aspects of Stage four object permanence and illusory contours, on a par with other birds and mammals.
 
2.
Chickens possess some understanding of numerosity and share some very basic arithmetic capacities with other animals.

3.
Chickens can demonstrate self-control and self-assessment, and these capacities may indicate self-awareness.
 
4.
Chickens communicate in complex ways, including through referential communication, which may depend upon some level of self-awareness and the ability to take the perspective of another animal. This capacity, if present in chickens, would be shared with other highly intelligent and social species, including primates.
 
5.
Chickens have the capacity to reason and make logical inferences. For example, chickens are capable of simple forms of transitive inference, a capability that humans develop at approximately the age of seven.
 
6.
Chickens perceive time intervals and may be able to anticipate future events.
 
7.
Chickens are behaviorally sophisticated, discriminating among individuals, exhibiting Machiavellian-like social interactions, and learning socially in complex ways that are similar to humans.
 
8.
Chickens have complex negative and positive emotions, as well as a shared psychology with humans and other ethologically complex animals. They exhibit emotional contagion and some evidence for empathy.

9.
Chickens have distinct personalities, just like all animals who are cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally complex individuals.
 
This is not to imply that the cognitive mechanisms underlying all of these apparent similarities are equivalent across species. Nor does it imply that higher-level explanations are always able to provide a thorough explanation of cognitive mechanisms. In fact, higher-level cognition is, unarguably, intertwined with more basic capacities and it may be contended that they are inseparable in many ways. Shettleworth (2010) argues that there is always an interplay between more fundamental cognitive mechanisms, e.g., associative learning, and other higher-level capacities, e.g., abstract thought, and that many human abilities derive from very basic cognitive processes. But the present findings do tell us that chickens, like other birds, are similar, in many ways, to mammals in their ethological complexity and that there are a number of findings that speak to the possibility of more complex capacities in chickens than heretofore recognized.

Comment: Bird brain development is noted to be quite enhanced as birds evolved from dinosaurs.