Crows Are No Bird Brains: Scientists Reveal How Smart Corvids Really Are

Crows are definitely not your average bird. Corvids, the family of birds that include ravens, crows and magpies, are highly intelligent. Now, though, researchers have discovered that the brains of crows produce intelligent behavior when the birds have to make strategic decisions.

Crows are some of the smartest birds in the Animal Kingdom. In fact, researchers have even called them "feathered primates" due to their abilities to use tools, to remember large numbers of feedings sites and to plan their social behaviors according to what other members of their group do. Although birds' brains are constructed in a fundamentally different way from those of mammals, including primates, it seems that this doesn't hinder the crow.

In order to examine crow brains a bit more closely, the researchers trained crows to carry out memory tests on a computer. The crows were shown an image and had to remember it. Shortly afterward, they had to select one of two test images on a touchscreen with their beaks based on a switching behavioral rule. Sometimes the crow had to select the same image out of the two images and sometimes the crow had to select the different one. In the end, the crows managed to carry out both tasks and switch between them as appropriate. This in particular demonstrates a high level of concentration and mental flexibility which few animal species can manage.

That's not all the researchers discovered, either. The birds were also able to carry out these tasks even when given new sets of images. The researchers spotted neuronal activity in the nidopallium caudolaterale, a brain region associated with the highest level of cognition in birds. By observing this brain activity, the scientists were often able to predict which rule the crow was following even before it made its choice.

"Many functions are realized differently in birds because a long evolutionary history separates us from these direct descendants of the dinosaurs," said Lena Veit, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This means that bird brains can show us an alternative solution of how intelligent behavior is produced with a different anatomy."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.