Ravens plan for the future

Studies have shown that ravens can not only operate simple machines, but can also invent alternative controls, teach other ravens these alternative controls and project the operating options of the machine into the future and thus be able to plan. In doing so, they are at least as skilled as monkeys and small children. During the experiment they even had to remove one of the ravens because he was too clever and taught other ravens to manipulate the machine ...

Ravens paralleled great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering (via Science Mag)

The ability to flexibly plan for events outside of the current sensory scope is at the core of being human and is crucial to our everyday lives and society. Studies on apes have shaped a belief that this ability evolved within the hominid lineage. Corvids, however, have shown evidence of planning their food hoarding, although this has been suggested to reflect a specific caching adaptation rather than domain-general planning. Here, we show that ravens plan for events unrelated to caching — tool-use and bartering — with delays of up to 17 hours, exert self-control, and consider temporal distance to future events. Their performance parallels that seen in apes and suggests that planning evolved independently in corvids, which opens new avenues for the study of cognitive evolution.

Ravens Are So Smart, One Hacked This Researcher's Experiment (via Motherboard)

In this study, researchers from Lund University in Sweden trained ravens to use a simple machine where they dropped a rock in a tube to earn a food reward. Later, they were put in a room with the puzzle box (but no rock), which was then removed. An hour later, the birds were presented with a row of objects: the rock, and several distractions. Nearly all of them chose the rock, and 86 percent managed to successfully use it to open the machine when it was presented to them 15 minutes later.

In another experiment, 78 percent of ravens were able to successfully barter with a human and exchange goods — trading a bottlecap for a reward — a higher success rate than what's been seen in similar experiments done with apes.

Co-author Can Kabadayi […] described to me how one experiment took an eerie turn: One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock / box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it.