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By Marlowe HOOD
Paris (AFP) – New Caledonian crows use mental images to twist twigs and make other tools, according to a provocative study that suggests that notoriously intelligent birds transmit patterns successful to future generations, "We find evidence of a specific type of emulation we call" mental matching, "told AFP co-author Alex Taylor, director of Language, Cognition and Culture Lab at the University of Aukland. 19659003] "In other words, crows can reverse the design of tools using only a mental image of this tool."
A long and quivering debate between evolutionary biologists asks how much of the ability to Crows making is genetically programmed, and how much is acquired and transmitted through learning and memory.
A famous experiment filmed in 2002 with "Betty the crow" shows the bird that bends a piece of straight wire into a hook in order to retrieve a piece of stuffed meat in a narrow This feat was hailed as evidence that the neo-Caledonian raven could invent new tools on the spot, a rare capacity among non-human animals
. But a study published a dozen years later found that more than a dozen crows caught in the wild also broke small branches and shaped them into tiny hooks with their beaks, which led some researchers to conclude that this ability was at least partly wired
. think the birds mimic the techniques observed, and others – including Taylor – say that crows have a more sophisticated approach.
The distinction is comparable to two methods of making a paper plane.
"You can follow a list of directions – fold in the middle, then corners, etc.," Taylor said.
Culturally transmitted
"Or you could have an image in your mind of what you want the plane to look like in the end, and work toward that goal."
To remove lingering ambiguity, Taylor and his colleagues captured eight wild crows and trained them to drop pieces of paper of different sizes into a vending machine to collect rewards.
In the second part of the experiment, birds – when given large cards – tore them to create pieces of similar size and shape to those that had earned them goodies.
"The crows were able to recreate tools without reference points – there was no tool that they could see by making a" tool "of the map," said Taylor.
The only way the birds could have reproduced the objects is to have a "mental model of the design of the tool in their mind."
Indeed, the New Caledonian crows do not seem to mimic nor do they pay much attention to building tools of other birds in the wild.
But that does not mean that the tools they conceive of can not be transmitted culturally.
"Cumulative cultural evolution is the natural selection of ideas – we copy the best ideas and then modify them," he explains.
"Some of these changes work, some do not, and the best ones are then copied and transmitted."
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