Crow Intelligence

Via Mixing Memory

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Birds have shown they can plan for a future state of mind;

The researchers, led by Nicky Clayton of the University of Cambridge, wanted to test an idea proposed by Wolfgang Köhler, Norbert Bischof and Doris Bischof-Köhler, three German psychologists. The Bischof-Köhler hypothesis says that only humans can mentally separate themselves from what they are experiencing to envisage how they might feel about future events.

To test whether this is so, Dr Clayton and her colleagues sought to tease apart scrub-jays' momentary desires from their planning for future needs. They let the birds eat as much of one food as they wanted, exploiting a condition called specific satiety—once the birds are full of one food, they show strong preference for something different. They then offered the birds that same food or a second one to store for later.

Initially the scrub-jays behaved as predicted, choosing to stow away the second food, which they had not just eaten. But minutes before allowing the birds to recover their stash, the researchers fed the birds to satiety with that second food—the one they had already stored. The birds changed their caching preferences on the very next trial. Even though they had just had their fill of the first food, they still cached it, presumably because they thought it would be their preferred choice later. The results are published in this week's Current Biology.

The finding matters because the birds seem to plan ahead for what they will want later, even though their choice conflicts with what they want now. It could prompt a reassessment of how animals perceive the world around them. Without the benefit of experimental subjects who can explain their thinking, however, Dr Clayton and her colleagues will have to develop ever more cunning experiments to infer complex mental processes from simple behaviour.

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