TED talk about how smart crows are.
One of my thousand imagined lives is to be an animal intelligence researcher – inventing tests to test the ways animals think. I learned in an intro to cognition class once about the following such test:
The testers sit someone down in front of a computer that shows a picture: either the letter ‘F’ or the mirror image of an F. The trick is that the F’s are shown rotated through some angle, 180º say – so that they are upside down, or 90º – so that they appear on their side, etc. The game is to decide if its a real ‘F’ facing the right way or if its the mirror image, and to push a button if its real. They time people doing this, and it turns out that the time it takes people to decide is proportional to the angle – the idea being that people are rotating the ‘F’ in their minds to get it upright in its usual position to see which way its facing. We also know that they are doing this because we can ask them and they tell us (not that people always know what they are doing, but anyway it makes sense so we believe them). The crazy thing is that if you do this same test with pigeons they have a completely flat response – no matter the angle, upright, upside down, whatever – it takes the same time. Now we don’t know what they are thinking, because we can’t ask them, but it seems they’re better at dealing with things at crazy angles – maybe because they fly around and land on things at different angles or something. Now, we could argue about this interpretation, and how to test this more conclusively etc., but now we’re thinking like animal intelligence researchers – and it seems pretty fun!
Anyway, in this TED talk, the crows are very smart – one of them apparently *invents* the hook right in front of us on video! That’s right – it doesn’t just make a hook, but invents one. And in japan the crows in one town use cars to crack nuts by dropping them in the street to be run over (i’ve seen seagulls do something similar with clams on rocks at the beach) but the really cool thing is that they wait for light to turn red before going out in the street to get their cracked nut! Anyway, the guy in the video built a vending machine for peanuts and trained some wild crows to find lost coins and drop them in the machine to get peanuts. I had a teacher try to get me to build a machine to teach squirrels to play tic-tac-toe once (all i ended up making was a machine that played tic-tac-toe – pretty lame) but the guy says squirrels couldn’t figure out his vending machine, so it was probably too ambitious anyway.
