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Rooks reveal remarkable tool use
- Adlai 17y agoInteresting. I'm curious to know whether the rooks improved in their abilities to use and craft "tools" as they encountered subsequent experiments, or whether their performance remained roughly constant. The rook seems very hesitant in the first experiments shown, but in the last two videos, it seemed much more confident. One possible reason for the lack of hesitation in the "metatool" experiment is that the rook seemed to watch closely as the scientist set up the trapdoors, and might have been already formulating a plan ahead of time. I think that if that's the case, then the rook has a pretty high level of sophistication -- more than if it was just using trial-and-error to figure out the right combination of stones.
- jnorthrop 17y agoI also wonder whether they can work in teams. For that matter I wonder if chimpanzees and crows (the other "tool users" mentioned in the article) work in teams. Interesting stuff.
- Adlai 17y agoChimps are very social animals. Ironically, one of their great cooperative activities is similar to that of humans: namely, killing eachother. From what I've learned about evolution, and "selfish gene" theory, it seems as though cooperation pervades social animal societies. According to this page [1], and the Wikipedia article on rooks, they seems to flock together. I wouldn't be surprised if further study reveals some cooperative behaviour. [1] http://www.first-nature.com/birds/corvus_frugilegus.htm http://www.first-nature.com/birds/corvus_frugilegus.htm
- dazzawazza 17y agoWithout knowing how many times the Rook has tried to solve the problems in the videos it's hard to judge. It would be nice to see the Rooks failing and learning from their mistakes and trying new tactics. Did the rooks just 'know' they could make a hook from wire and lift up the treat? I doubt it. Interesting none the less. Makes Hitchcock's The Birds seem a little more scary.
- thorax 17y agoWell, it did say this in the article: > But in this study, three of the four rooks spontaneously created the hook in their first trial. Boggles the mind a bit.
- tdonia 17y agorelated: Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel... w/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840 Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8787802... w/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409609 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409609
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- ajb 17y agoI do think this is fascinating. However, perhaps we ought to have expected a flying creature to have rather good spatial reasoning skills...
- Adlai 17y agoI'd disagree... look at flying insects. Occasionally, a bee flies into my house through an open window. It often tries to fly through closed windows afterwards, suggesting that it is unable to perceive a transparent solid. Also, there's the cliched moth flying into a candle/lightbulb. Birds and bats, however, don't do that. Speaking of bats -- it might be interesting to see similar experiments studying bats' reasoning abilities. Does "seeing" the world through SONAR make them reason differently from birds (or us)?
- ajb 17y agoThat's true. I'd forgotten about insects. There's been some interesting work done on their visual system (google 'optic flow' insect).
- stcredzero 17y agoBirds do fly into windows -- once. I've seen it happen sitting inside the sliding glass doors that open onto the patio of my parent's house. They either don't survive the event, or they learn. Flying insects don't learn as well. They mostly have hardwired programs that work well for them most of the time.