In 2002, when I watched Betty, the New Caledonian crow, I used to hook a wire piece and use it, I would like to pull a small container with tubes with meat
Betty & # 39; s behavior fascinated the scientists because it seemed so creative: there was no obvious solution, but Betty found a way. How can this crowd think, because it has been separated from people by 620 million years of independent evolution?
Our latest research today helps us answer this question.
He provides convincing evidence that, like a chess player thinking a few steps forward, New Caledonian crows can plan three behavior sequences using tools to solve the problem.
For the past 20 years, Caledonian crows have created a variety of behaviors that have shown that they can be very intelligent. However, the creation of convincing evidence of what is really going on through the animal's mind is complex.
In previous work, we have given crowded problems that require longer and longer behavior sequences. However, in order to really understand whether the new Caledonian crows can plan, we need to distinguish between online planning and early planning.
Online planning involves drawing up a plan at an instant. This can be considered as basically planning to fly; you take one step, evaluate the impact and plan another.
Preplanning is a true planning. You are planning a step-by-step sequence, for example, when you are thinking about two or three movements of chess and do the following
Seventeen years after the bend of the Betty hook, because three of our teams (Romana Gruber, Martina Schiestl and Markus Boeckle) were finally able to create an experiment designed to test bird planning skills.
Difficult problem solving
We introduced a crowd complex problem. The raven had to use a short stick to take the stone out of the pipe, and then use this stone to release the platform to get the meat, ignoring another pipe that had a long stick.
The fish was that every stage of the problem was unnoticed by others, a hidden wooden shield that prevented the frogs from seeing more than one part of the problem at one time.
To make it harder, we changed the position of two tubes accidentally between the tests, so the crows had to remember where they last saw the right tool.
This meant that when the crows approached the problem, they had to mentally represent where there was a long stick, stone and meat, and then use these images
] If the problem were solved on the spot (ie when planning on the Internet), they could make mistakes
The crows we introduced to this issue were very good. One person, Saturn, has never really made a mistake in this task
Evolution of Planning
These results show that New Caledonian crows can anticipate three future behaviors. Although they claim that Betty has planned his wire bending behavior, the consequences of these results are much wider than explaining his behavior.
The New Caledonian crows have so far attracted this interest because they are very useful models to understand the evolution of the tool. use. Our results mean that we can now use these birds to understand something even more important: the evolution of planning itself. Together with the use of our tools, it enabled us to reach the highest level of civilization. Therefore, this combination is the essence of man.
Now we know another species, and a tool using a crow on the Pacific Island can also combine these skills. Understanding their history, how they managed to have these skills, will learn a lot about our own history, about why we've created to think about how we do it today.
Alex Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland.
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