Science Alert reports:

Two male crows have performed better than humans and monkeys in a classic psychology task designed to test how the brain makes decisions based on what it sees.

In prior experiments, corvids (a family of birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, and jays) have shown a range of remarkable mental abilities once thought unique to primates.

New Caledonian crows build compound tools and plan three steps ahead; western scrub jays have episodic-like memories; ravens are “smart enough to be paranoid“.

Now, two neurobiologists from the University of Tübingen in Germany have tested the decision-making prowess of carrion crows (Corvus corone), and the results kind of leave our primate brains in the dust.

The research is published in Science.

The researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder are not only interested in demonstrating crows’ intelligence. They want to understand how the birds manage such intellectual feats with such fundamentally different brains from ours.

“Such behavioral flexibility might seem unexpected because a layered cerebral cortex, the highest integration center in the mammalian brain, is not existant in birds,” Nieder wrote in a paper almost a decade ago.

Instead of layers, he explained, bird brains rely on circuits that originate from a different part of the pallium. Their brains are smaller than ours, but so are their neurons, which means less distance for information to travel, and more processing power per square inch. [Continue reading…]