Some Birds Are Excellent Tool-Makers (abc.net.au)

brindafella writes: Veterinary scientists from Viena have shown that Goffin's cockatoos can do an excellent job of remaking cardboard into tools to get rewards. This follows on from earlier experiments with the New Caledonian crow that can select tools for its purposes. So, birds are definitely not "bird-brained." "[The study] tells us that the cockatoos' mind is highly flexible and that they can modify their solution to a problem in order to save effort," said Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and lead author of the paper.

The Australian Broadcast Company explains how the study was conducted: "[S]ix trained birds were given a piece of cardboard and placed in front of a cage that had food accessible through a small hole, but placed at different distances away. The birds used their beak to cut strips of cardboard they then used to reach the food. Importantly, when the food was close, the birds made a shorter strip. When it was far away, they made a longer strip. But when the researchers made the hole in the cage smaller, only one of the birds was able to fashion their cardboard tool to be narrow enough to fit through the hole. The successful bird was the only female in the group, and the researchers think she was able to do this because her beak was small enough to make a narrow tool."

Comments

Re:pffft

[Aighearach]

You can easily measure the social skills of a bird species by how large of groups they form for shared activities.

I've seen groups of many thousands of crows who were gathered for no apparent purpose other than some shared social activity. It wasn't mating season, or near a change in weather season, so I'm guessing it was election season.

Just because crows like combat sports doesn't automatically mean they lack social skills.

Crows...

[jd]

...have been observed to make original tools (ie: not derivative from prior direct or indirect experience or observation) for original problems not encountered in the wild.

This creates some interesting problems, not least for those people who insist all human creativity is derivative, never inventive. However, that's off topic.

We also know African Grey parrots can understand the concept of zero and basic mathematics.

We now have a better understanding of which birds have which sorts of intelligence. It would seem logical, if it hasn't already been done, to use the 9.1T, 13T and next-gen MRI scanners to identify specific structures that might relate to such intelligence.

Currently, the "whole brain" simulators that exist can't simulate whole human brains. They could certainly simulate the relevant structures in an avian brain, though.

Once we know what those structures actually do, we can devise experiments via proper models. If the simulator says the brain can learn X with a level of difficulty of Y, you have an experiment. You can study a random assortment of crows or whatever and see if, on average, they do indeed learn X with a difficulty of Y.

In that case, your model is good enough to describe, define and parameterize non-human intelligence. Which means you can start to do useful things with animal intelligence studies.