Intelligent males may make female birds swoon: study

January 10, 2019 by Ivan Couronne

 A report that shows that female birds prefer smarter males aligns with one of Charles Darwin's old theories, which held that mate choice could contribute to the evolution of intelligence

Male birds are often the ones with the most vibrant feathers, or the most elaborate songs, but researchers said Thursday that what female birds could really appreciate is a male who shows his intelligence.

The report in the journal Science aligns with one of Charles Darwin's old theories, which held that mate choice could contribute to the evolution of intelligence.

"Our study demonstrates that direct observation of cognitive skills can affect mate preference," said the study, authored by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

Researchers used 34 small Australian parrots, known as budgerigars, to test the notion that a suitor's smarts could outweigh style or songs.

A female bird was exposed to two similar looking males, in a cage in which she could only interact with one at a time. Prior study designs like this have shown that females tend to lean toward males with slightly nicer appearances, or more appealing songs.

Researchers could tell which male was preferred by the amount of time the female spent interacting with him.

Then, they swept away the lesser male to engage him in a special training session in opening a container filled with seeds.

The female—and her preferred male—received no such training, and were given open boxes of seed to eat from freely.

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New Caledonian crows found able to infer weight of an object by watching how it behaves in the wind

January 9, 2019 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org report

A team of researchers with members affiliated with the University of Auckland, the University of Cambridge, Bertha von Suttner University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has found evidence that suggests New Caledonian crows can infer the weight of an object by watching how it behaves in the wind. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes experiments they carried out with crows they captured and what they found.

Humans can easily gauge the weight of objects by their behavior under windy conditions. In breezy conditions, a napkin will fly off a table at an outdoor café, for example, but a fork generally will not. We prepare for this eventuality by placing something heavy on the napkin, but not on the fork. But until now, no other creature has been found to have this ability.

To find out if New Caledonian crows might have this ability, the researchers went out into the wild and captured 12 specimens and brought them back to their lab. All of the birds were taught to use the weight of an object as the criteria needed in order to receive a food reward. Half were taught that the lighter of two objects was needed, while the other half were taught that it was the heavier object that was needed to get their reward.

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Neuroscientists uncover secret to intelligence in parrots

Study shows evidence of convergence in bird and primate evolution

Date:  July 3, 2018

Source:  University of Alberta

Summary:

University of Alberta neuroscientists have identified the neural circuit that may underlay intelligence in birds, according to a new study. The discovery is an example of convergent evolution between the brains of birds and primates, with the potential to provide insight into the neural basis of human intelligence.

"An area of the brain that plays a major role in primate intelligence is called the pontine nuclei," explained Cristian Gutierrez-Ibanez, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology. "This structure transfers information between the two largest areas of the brain, the cortex and cerebellum, which allows for higher-order processing and more sophisticated behaviour. In humans and primates, the pontine nuclei are large compared to other mammals. This makes sense given our cognitive abilities."

Birds have very small pontine nuclei. Instead, they have a similar structure called the medial spiriform nucleus (SpM) that has similar connectivity. Located in a different part of the brain, the SpM does the same thing as the pontine nuclei, circulating information between the cortex and the cerebellum. "This loop between the cortex and the cerebellum is important for the planning and execution of sophisticated behaviours," said Doug Wylie, professor of psychology and co-author on the new study.

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Think chicken: Think intelligent, caring and complex

Review looks at studies on chicken intelligence, social development and emotions 

Date: January 3, 2017
Source: Springer

Credit: Farm Sanctuary

Chickens are not as clueless or "bird-brained" as people believe them to be. They have distinct personalities and can outmaneuver one another. They know their place in the pecking order, and can reason by deduction, which is an ability that humans develop by the age of seven. Chicken intelligence is therefore unnecessarily underestimated and overshadowed by other avian groups. So says Lori Marino, senior scientist for The Someone Project, a joint venture of Farm Sanctuary and the Kimmela Center in the USA, who reviewed the latest research about the psychology, behavior and emotions of the world's most abundant domestic animal. Her review is published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

"They are perceived as lacking most of the psychological characteristics we recognize in other intelligent animals and are typically thought of as possessing a low level of intelligence compared with other animals," Marino says. "The very idea of chicken psychology is strange to most people."


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Birds are more like ‘feathered apes’ than ‘bird brains’

For centuries scientists dismissed birds as dumb based on physical differences in their brains. How wrong we were. 

Jeremy Hance

Saturday 5 November 2016 09.53 GMT Last modified on Monday 7 November 2016 15.34 GMT 

When Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools in 1960, humans lost their self-aggrandizing status as the world’s only tool makers. Now scientists are beginning to realise there may be much more ‘intelligent life’ in the universe than previously thought, but it’s just here: on our planet. Since Goodall’s discovery, researchers have found numerous other mammals displaying high levels of intelligence, including the great apes, elephants, dolphins, orcas and many canine species. But only in the last couple decades has scientists’ attention turned to intelligence in non-mammals, including birds. 

“Studies of avian intelligence have been hampered by the old fashioned idea that birds are stupid, and not worth considering in terms of intelligence,” said Nathan Emery, author of the new book, Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence and senior lecturer at Queen Mary: University of London. 

An in-depth look at recent research and fascinating lab experiments, the book published by Ivy Press overturns any notion that birds are somehow dumb. Instead, it argues with an overwhelming amount of evidence that a number of bird species should be considered more as “feathered apes.” 

The idea that birds are unintelligent was initially proposed by looking at the brains of birds. Birds lack a cerebral cortex, which allowed scientists for decades to assume they were incapable of any higher thinking. However, researchers now know that a different part of the bird brain – the pallium – has evolved to do many of the same tasks as the cerebral cortex.

“Avian and mammalian brains seem to be functioning the same way, but interestingly their hardware is completely different,” said Emery, who noted that bird brains generally have shorter connections between specific parts of their brains than mammals. 

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Dodos might have been quite intelligent, new research finds

X-ray scans reveal that dodo's relative brain size was similar to pigeons, likely had enhanced sense of smell

Date:February 23, 2016

Source:American Museum of Natural History

New research suggests that the dodo, an extinct bird whose name has entered popular culture as a symbol of stupidity, was actually fairly smart. The work, published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, finds that the overall size of the dodo's brain in relation to its body size was on par with its closest living relatives: pigeons--birds whose ability to be trained implies a moderate level of intelligence. The researchers also discovered that the dodo had an enlarged olfactory bulb -- the part of the brain responsible for smelling -- an uncharacteristic trait for birds, which usually concentrate their brainpower into eyesight.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. They were last seen in 1662.

"When the island was discovered in the late 1500s, the dodos living there had no fear of humans and they were herded onto boats and used as fresh meat for sailors," said Eugenia Gold, the lead author of the paper, a research associate and recent graduate of the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School, and an instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. "Because of that behavior and invasive species that were introduced to the island, they disappeared in less than 100 years after humans arrived. Today, they are almost exclusively known for becoming extinct, and I think that's why we've given them this reputation of being dumb."

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Smarter than a first-grader? Crows can perform as well as 7- to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect water displacement tasks

Date:

July 23, 2014

Source:

University of California - Santa Barbara

Summary:

In Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher, a thirsty bird happens upon a vessel of water, but when he tries to drink from it, he finds the water level out of his reach. Not strong enough to knock over the pitcher, the bird drops pebbles into it -- one at a time -- until the water level rises enough for him to drink his fill. New research demonstrates the birds' intellectual prowess may be more fact than fiction.

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Crows understand water displacement at the level of a small child: Show causal understanding of a 5- to 7-year-old child

Date:

March 26, 2014

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

New Caledonian crows may understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5- to 7-year-old child. Understanding causal relationships between actions is a key feature of human cognition. However, the extent to which non-human animals are capable of understanding causal relationships is not well understood. Scientists used the Aesop's fable riddle -- in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out-of reach-reward -- to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement.

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Pigeons Peck for Computerized Treat

May 29, 2013 — Go to about any public square, and you see pigeons pecking at the ground, always in search of crumbs dropped by a passerby. While the pigeons' scavenging may seem random, new research by psychologists at the University of Iowa suggest the birds are capable of making highly intelligent choices, sometimes with problem-solving skills to match.

The study by Edward Wasserman and colleagues centered on the "string task," a longstanding, standard test of intelligence that involves attaching a treat to one of two strings and seeing if the participant (human or animal) can reel in that treat by pulling the correct string.

In this case, the UI researchers took the pigeons into the digital age: The birds looked at a computer touch screen with square buttons connected to either dishes that appeared to be full or empty. If the bird pecked the correct button on the screen, the virtual full bowl would move closer, ultimately to the point where the pigeon would be rewarded with real food.

"The pigeons proved that they could indeed learn this task with a variety of different string configurations -- even those that involved crossed strings, the most difficult of all configurations to learn with real strings," says Wasserman, Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology and the corresponding author of the study published in the journal Animal Cognition.

In experiments, the authors found the pigeons chose correctly between 74 percent and 90 percent of the time across three varieties of string tests. The breadth of the string tests, coupled with the pigeons' accuracy, suggest that virtual string tests can be used in place of conventional string experiments -- and with other animal species as well, the researchers say.

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Crow Intelligence Study Suggests The Birds Have 'Theory Of Mind'

By Michael Balter

Are crows mind readers? Recent studies have suggested that the birds hide food because they think others will steal it -- a complex intuition that has been seen in only a select few creatures. Some critics have suggested that the birds might simply be stressed out, but new research reveals that crows may be gifted after all.

Cracks first began forming in the crow mind-reading hypothesis last year. One member of a research team from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands spent 7 months in bird cognition expert Nicola Clayton's University of Cambridge lab in the United Kingdom studying Western scrub jays, a member of the crow family that is often used for these studies. The Groningen team then developed a computer model in which "virtual jays" cached food under various conditions. In PLOS ONE, they argued that the model showed the jays' might be moving their food—or recaching it—not because they were reading the minds of their competitors, but simply because of the stress of having another bird present (especially a more dominant one) and of losing food to thieves. The result contradicted previous work by Clayton's group suggesting that crows might have a humanlike awareness of other creatures' mental states—a cognitive ability known as theory of mind that has been claimed in dogs, chimps, and even rats.

In the new study, Clayton and her Cambridge graduate student James Thom decided to test the stress hypothesis. First, they replicated earlier work on scrub jays by letting the birds hide peanuts in trays of ground corn cobs—either unobserved or with another bird watching—and later giving them a chance to rebury them. As in previous studies, the jays recached a much higher proportion of the peanuts if another bird could see them: nearly twice as much as in private, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.

Continued:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/crow-intelligence-mind_n_2457181.html