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Illustration of the four nonverbal cognitive tools displayed by corvids and apes, which are proposed as the basis for complex cognition: causal reasoning (New Caledonian crow and chimpanzee tool use), imagination (insight in ravens and role taking in chimpanzees), flexibility (western
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Discussions of the evolution of intelligence have focused on monkeys and apes because of their close evolutionary relationship to humans. Other large-brained social animals, such as corvids, also understand their physical and social worlds. Here we review recent studies of tool manufacture, mental time travel, and social cognition in corvids, and s...
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Over the past 30 years, a cognitive renaissance has produced startling revelations about how species perceive their physical and social worlds. Once considered mere automata by Descartes, recent research supports claims that many animals possess advanced cognitive capacities (Shettleworth, 2010). Moreover, advanced cognition appears to have arisen...
Citations
... Most, if not all, cases of intraspecific deception take this form. Many examples from nonhuman primates include the use of alarm calls to distract conspecifics from resources, to distract aggressors, and to hide resources or mates from other individuals (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990): squirrels deceptively create false caches of food in the presence of conspecifics to prevent detection of real caches (Steele et al., 2008), and corvids have been found to track the eyesight of other corvids to hide food behind barriers (with this behavior extending even to solitary nutcrackers) (Bugnyar & Heinrich, 2005;Clary and Kelly, 2011;De Kort and Clayton, 2005;Emery and Clayton, 2004). Separately, in aggressive mimicry, predators "communicate with their prey by making signals to indirectly manipulate prey behavior" (Jackson & Cross, 2013:161). ...
The evolutionary origins of deception and its functional role in our species is a major focus of research in the science of human origins. Several hypotheses have been proposed for its evolution, often packaged under either the Social Brain Hypothesis, which emphasizes the role that the evolution of our social systems may have played in scaffolding our cognitive traits, and the Foraging Brain Hypothesis, which emphasizes how changes in the human dietary niche were met with subsequent changes in cognition to facilitate foraging of difficult-to-acquire foods. Despite substantive overlap, these hypotheses are often presented as competing schools of thought, and there have been few explicitly proposed theoretical links unifying the two. Utilizing cross-cultural data gathered from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), we identify numerous (n = 357) examples of the application of deception toward prey across 145 cultures. By comparing similar behaviors in nonhuman animals that utilize a hunting strategy known as aggressive mimicry, we suggest a potential pathway through which the evolution of deception may have taken place. Rather than deception evolving as a tactic for deceiving conspecifics, we suggest social applications of deception in humans could have evolved from an original context of directing these behaviors toward prey. We discuss this framework with regard to the evolution of other mental traits, including language, Theory of Mind, and empathy.
... LeDoux and Birch suggest that autonoesis is limited to humans and possibly some other animals such as the great apes, but it is important not to forget that evolution need not be homologous. Distantly related animals, such as corvids, may have evolved similar cognitive abilities to the great apes, precisely because their ancestors had similar problems to solve 21 . ...
There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth, Thomas Suddendorf, and Marie Vanderkerckhoeve.
... B 378: 20220307 the short-lived nature of ephemeral tools (i.e. sticks, sponges) can limit their intergenerational transfer [154], and tool use is not always socially learned [155]. Thus, although material inheritance when combined with social inheritance can strongly privilege some over others, the extent of these effects varies and warrants further study. ...
The extent of (in)equality is highly diverse across species of social mammals, but we have a poor understanding of the factors that produce or inhibit equitable social organizations. Here, we adopt a comparative evolutionary perspective to test whether the evolution of social dominance hierarchies, a measure of social inequality in animals, exhibits phylogenetic conservatism and whether interspecific variation in these traits can be explained by sex, age or captivity. We find that hierarchy steepness and directional consistency evolve rapidly without any apparent constraint from evolutionary history. Given this extraordinary variability, we next consider multiple factors that have evolved to mitigate social inequality. Social networks, coalitionary support and knowledge transfer advantage to privilege some individuals over others. Nutritional access and prenatal stressors can impact the development of offspring, generating health disparities with intergenerational consequences. Intergenerational transfer of material resources (e.g. stone tools, food stashes, territories) advantage those who receive. Nonetheless, many of the same social species that experience unequal access to food (survival) and mates (reproduction) engage in levelling mechanisms such as food sharing, adoption, revolutionary coalitions, forgiveness and inequity aversion. Taken together, mammals rely upon a suite of mechanisms of (in)equality to balance the costs and benefits of group living.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
... Those animals must then be trained to perform the cognitive task(s) and, once trained, must be motivated to perform repeatedly, thus limiting both the tests that can be employed and the species that can be studied. Traditionally, cognitive studies on animals have focused on a single cognitive feature, such as tool use (Emery & Clayton, 2004;Hunt, 1996) or spatial memory. While such studies demonstrate that some animals are capable of impressive cognitive feats, they are less useful as behavioural assays of an animal's complement of cognitive abilities (Shaw, 2017). ...
Exposure of wildlife to anthropogenic noise is associated with an array of disruptive effects. Research on this topic has focused on the behavioural and physiological responses of animals to noise, with little work investigating potential links to cognitive function. To fill this gap in our understanding, we explored how environmentally relevant urban noise affected the performance of wild-caught, city-living Australian magpies ( Gymnorhina / Cracticus tibicen tyrannica ) on a battery of cognitive tasks that included associative and reversal learning, inhibitory control, and spatial memory. Birds were housed and tested in a standardised laboratory environment; sample sizes varied across tasks (n = 7–9 birds). Tests were conducted over four weeks, during which all magpies were exposed to both an urban noise playback and a quiet control. Birds were presented with the entire test battery twice (in each treatment); however, tests were always performed without noise (playback muted during testing). Australian magpies performed similarly in both loud and quiet conditions on all four tasks. We also found that prior experience with the associative learning task had a strong effect on performance, with birds performing better on their second trial. Similar to previous findings on Australian magpies tested on the same tasks in the wild under noisy conditions, we could not find any disruptive effects on cognitive performance in a controlled experimental setting.
... Another possibility to shed light on the evolution of social comparison is to test species that are phylogenetically distant to the primate line but face similar social challenges in daily life so that similar selection pressures could have favoured the convergent evolution of these socio-cognitive skills. Corvids are particularly suited for such an approach, as these birds excel in a variety of cognitive tasks (review in Güntürkün and Bugnyar 2016), often performing comparable to primates (Emery and Clayton 2004;Marler 1996). For instance, ravens, Corvus corax selectively choose cooperation partners (Asakawa-Haas et al. 2016), reciprocate favours (Fraser and Bugnyar 2012) and retaliate cheating (Massen et al. 2015); they judge competitors for food based on what those can or cannot see ) and extract information about others' relationships from a thirdparty perspective (Massen et al. 2014). ...
Comparing oneself to others is a key process in humans that allows individuals to gauge their performances and abilities and thus develop and calibrate their self-image. Little is known about its evolutionary foundations. A key feature of social comparison is the sensitivity to other individuals’ performance. Recent studies on primates produced equivocal results, leading us to distinguish between a ‘strong’ variant of the social comparison hypothesis formulated for humans and a ‘weak’ variant found in non-human primates that would comprise some elements of human social comparison. Here, we focus on corvids that are distantly related to primates and renowned for their socio-cognitive skills. We were interested in whether crows’ task performances were influenced (i) by the presence of a conspecific co-actor performing the same discrimination task and (ii) by the simulated acoustic cues of a putative co-actor performing better or worse than themselves. Crows reached a learning criterion quicker when tested simultaneously as compared to when tested alone, indicating a facilitating effect of social context. The performance of a putative co-actor influenced their performance: crows were better at discriminating familiar images when their co-actor was better than they were. Standard extremity (how pronounced the difference was between the performance of the subject and that of the co-actor), and category membership (affiliation status and sex), of the putative co-actors had no effect on their performance. Our findings are in line with the ‘weak’ variant of social comparison and indicate that elements of human social comparison can be found outside of primates.
... Tool innovation is an indispensable part of human lives, and it has also been observed in a variety of nonhuman animals such as crows (Von Bayern et al., 2009) and chimpanzees (Whiten, Horner & de Waal, 2005). Tool innovation has often been taken to be a distinctive mark of intelligence in biological systems (Emery & Clayton, 2004;Reader & Laland, 2002). ...
Much discussion about large language models and language-and-vision models has focused on whether these models are intelligent agents. We present an alternative perspective. We argue that these artificial intelligence models are cultural technologies that enhance cultural transmission in the modern world, and are efficient imitation engines. We explore what AI models can tell us about imitation and innovation by evaluating their capacity to design new tools and discover novel causal structures, and contrast their responses with those of human children. Our work serves as a first step in determining which particular representations and competences, as well as which kinds of knowledge or skill, can be derived from particular learning techniques and data. Critically, our findings suggest that machines may need more than large scale language and images to achieve what a child can do.
... Causal reasoning is adaptive for animals that live in complex environments where learning about reoccurring sequences of events (physical or social) is important for survival (Emery and Clayton 2004;Huber and Gajdon 2006). Herein, we define causal reasoning as the construction of mental representations of sequences of events, where a particular event brings about a second event via a certain action or process. ...
... Accordingly, wild Australian magpies that live in larger groups show increased cognitive performance, which is also associated with increased reproductive success (Ashton et al. 2018). Therefore, based on previous cognitive studies on magpies and because of the social group living in this species, we predict that Australian magpies have evolved the ability to understand causality and exhibit means-end behaviour (Emery and Clayton 2004). ...
The string-pulling paradigm is an approach commonly used in the study of animal cognition to investigate problem-solving abilities. This test involves an out-of-reach reward that can only be acquired through pulling a string. Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen tyrannica) can solve cognitive tasks requiring associative and reversal learning, spatial memory, and inhibitory control. Nonetheless, whether magpies can pass a test of means-end understanding—the string-pull test—is unclear. We tested wild magpies on a string-pulling task with five configurations, including a long loose string that required several pulls to obtain food, a short string that only required a single pull to complete, and two short strings—one intact and connected to the food reward; the other broken and unable to yield food when pulled. Of the 11 magpies tested, none solved the long string task at first presentation. Two naïve birds and three, subsequently trained, birds succeeded at the short string. Once proficient at the short string, four of these five birds then solved the long string task; in addition, three learned to choose a functional, intact string over a non-functional, broken string. Overall, these observations provide evidence that Australian magpies have the ability to solve string-pulling tasks but it remains unclear whether they do so by trial-and-error or if they possess means-end understanding.
Significance statement
We found, for the first time, that wild, free-ranging Australian magpies can learn to solve different versions of a string-pulling task; a version with a short string, a long string, and two strings next to each other where one of them was broken and non-functional (broken string task). Some magpies spontaneously solved the task with the short string, where other magpies required training, and magpies only managed to solve the task with the long string after they had succeeded on the short string task. Furthermore, some of the magpies solved the broken string task but required a high number of trials to do so. Overall, our findings show that Australian magpies have the ability to solve string-pulling tasks but it remains unclear whether they do so by trial-and-error or if they understand causal relations between objects.
... Yet our results indicate that corvids may not be able to detect the cues left behind by predators (Ekanayake et al., 2015), or ignore them if they are detected. Corvids have excellent memories, for example they may remember researchers' vehicles and follow them to resource sites (Ekanayake et al., 2015;Emery & Clayton, 2004). While travelling around our field site, we often spotted corvids circling carcasses in the air, providing them with an opportunity to assess the activity levels of other scavengers including predators before visiting a carcass. ...
Vigilance is an important anti-predator behaviour that can be an indicator of the predation risk faced by potential prey animals. Here, we assess the collective vigilance, or the vigilance level of an entire group, of corvids (Family: Corvidae) at experimentally placed carcasses in a desert environment in Australia. Specifically, we explore the relationship between collective vigilance levels and
the habitat in which the carcass was placed, the time since a potential predator (dingo Canis dingo, wedge-tailed eagle Aquila audax or red fox Vulpes vulpes) was present at a carcass, and the group size of corvids around the carcass. We found that corvids are more vigilant in open habitat, but that group size and the recent presence of a potential predator does not affect the
ollective vigilance behaviour of corvids. The results demonstrate the important link between habitat and vigilance, and that animals may adopt anti-predator behaviours irrespective of the size of the group in which they occur or the recent presence of a potential predator.
... Members of the family Corvidae have high brain development and display innovative behaviors to overcome biological challenges (Emery and Clayton 2004). Their social organization demands cooperative strategies to share resources, as flock cohesion can be demised by intraspecific competition (Chiarati et al. 2010). ...
Cyanocorax cyanopogon (Wied-Neuwied, 1821), a bird endemic to Brazil, inhabits dry scrub and woodlands and the borders of tropical and riparian forests. Although C. cyanopogon is more common in central and northeastern Brazil, owing to increasing deforestation, its distribution has expanded to south. There are several records of this species outside its distribution as usually given. Here, we present the southernmost record of this species in Brazil, showing this species’ expansion to the Southeastern Region. Therefore, this new record shows the importance of surveys to fill gaps in biodiversity knowledge, especially in disturbed environments.
... In 2004, Nathan Emery and Nicola Clayton from the Department of animal behavior and experimental psychology of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom jointly published their research in the journal Science. The research shows that crows are smarter than chimpanzees in some research tests [28]. Crows can use or even make tools to collect food, understand causal relationships, have a certain ability of logical reasoning, and can identify the faces that bring them threats and warn their companions. ...
... It is also very time-consuming and tedious to adjust the appropriate f l value for local search and convergence speed. According to Emery and Clayton, crows have highly accurate spatial memory, and crows living at high altitudes store up to 30,000 pine tree seeds over a wide area and can retrieve the seeds after six months [28]. This also reflects that crows will take different flight lengths to hide or retrieve food. ...
Influence maximization is a key topic of study in social network analysis. It refers to selecting a set of seed users from a social network and maximizing the number of users expected to be affected. Many related research works on the classical influence maximization problem have concentrated on increasing the influence spread, omitting the cost of seed nodes in the diffusion process. In this work, a multi-objective crow search algorithm (MOCSA) is proposed to optimize the problem with maximum influence spread and minimum cost based on a redefined discrete evolutionary scheme. Specifically, the parameter setting based on the dynamic control strategy and the random walk strategy based on black holes are adopted to improve the convergence efficiency of MOCSA. Six real social networks were selected for experiments and analyzed in comparison with other advanced algorithms. The results of experiments indicate that our proposed MOCSA algorithm performs better than the benchmark algorithm in most cases and improves the total objective function value by more than 20%. In addition, the running time of the MOCSA has also been effectively shortened.
