Crows display human-like geometric intuition in new study
The latest study has revealed that the sense of geometric intuition in crows is very similar to ours. These birds can distinguish shapes, which suggests their advanced intelligence, researchers reveal.
Crows, from the corvid family, can recognize geometric shapes, as confirmed by a new study published in the latest issue of the scientific journal "Science Advances". It turns out these birds are more intelligent than we thought. They can detect an outlier element in a set of geometric shapes, which was previously considered a uniquely human ability. Three researchers tested their theory on two male carrion crows (Corvus corone).
What was the experiment about?
The study conducted by Andreas Nieder and his team from the University of Tübingen in Germany demonstrated that crows can identify shapes with regular features, such as squares, as opposed to irregular ones like rhombuses. Experiments were conducted on two crows that were trained to detect shapes that stood out from the rest on a computer screen. The team worked with two male carrion crows aged 11 and 10 years.
The crows were trained to detect a single shape that deviated from the norm, which did not match five identical two-dimensional shapes displayed on a computer screen. "The crows, just like humans, had the most difficulty detecting geometric regularity in a rhombus," said animal physiologist Andreas Nieder to the "Science Alert" portal.
birds use this sense to navigate larger environments
To demonstrate which shape the crows recognized as an "intruder," they pecked at its position on the screen. In the main trials, birds were shown sets of quadrilaterals with varying degrees of regularity, with each shape randomly rotated and scaled in half of the cases. Crows more easily detected deviations from the norm among quadrilateral shapes with regular features, such as equal side lengths in a square or constant 90-degree angles in a rectangle. The more regular the angles and sides of the shape, the more accurate the detection of the outlier element by the crows.
"This basic intuition in crows, their ability to grasp geometric properties in two-dimensional shapes, exemplifies how core knowledge of magnitudes and geometry is rooted in biological evolution," Nieder emphasized. He added, "birds utilize [spatial regularities], for instance, for orientation and navigation in larger environments and in doing so have a survival advantage."
This study shows that crows, like humans, may have an innate ability to recognize geometric regularity, which could be more common in the animal kingdom than previously thought.
