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Neo-Caledonian crows use mental images to twist twigs and make other tools, according to a provocative study that suggests that notoriously intelligent birds transmit successful patterns to future generations, a hallmark of culture.
"We find evidence of a specific type of emulation we call mental matching," AFP Alex Taylor, director of Language, Cognition and Culture Lab, told AFP. from the University of Aukland. Crows can reverse tool designs by using only a mental image of this tool.
A long and quivering debate between evolutionary biologists asks how much of the crow's tool-making ability is genetically programmed and how much is learned and passed on learning and memory
A Famous Experiment Filmed in 2002 with "Betty" the raven "showed the bird that bends a piece of straight wire into a hook in order to retrieve a piece of stuffed meat in a narrow plastic tube.
The exploit was hailed as evidence that the New Caledonian crow could invent new tools on the spot, a rare ability among nonhuman animals
but a study published a dozen years ago later revealed that more than a dozen crows out of small branches and The researchers concluded that this ability is at least partly wired.
To the extent that it is learned, there is another division: some experts think that birds mimic the techniques observed, and others … including Taylor-say 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 towards that goal."
To remove lingering ambiguity, Taylor and his colleagues captured eight wild ravens 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.
"Crows could recreate tool models without a reference point – there was no tool that they could see by making a" tool "map," said Taylor .
The only way birds could have reproduced the objects is to have a "mental model of tool design". in their minds. "
Indeed, New Caledonian crows do not appear to imitate or attach great attention to the construction of tools of other birds in the wild.
But that does not mean that the tools they conceive can not be culturally transmitted.
"Cumulative cultural evolution is the natural selection of ideas – we copy the best ideas and then modify them," he explains. [19659005] "Some of these changes work, some do not, and the best ones are copied and transmitted."
Learn more:
Caledonian crows extract their prey faster with complex hook tools
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