“Crows Can Count Out Loud: The Surprising Similarity to Human Toddlers”

In a groundbreaking study conducted by neuroscientist Diana Liao at the University of Tubingen in Germany, it has been discovered that crows have the ability to count out loud, similar to how human toddlers learn to tally things up. Liao trained three male carrion crows to produce a specific number of calls in response to random visual cues and sounds, such as a guitar chord, drumroll, cash register noise, and frequency sweep.

Initially, the crows seemed to adopt a simpler strategy of vocalizing until they received a reward. However, after being trained to call a certain number of times, stop, and then peck a screen to report their final answer, the crows demonstrated impressive accuracy in their counting abilities. Even when they made mistakes, their wrong answers tended to hover around the correct number, showing a clear understanding of numerical concepts.

The study also found that the crows took varying amounts of time to react depending on the number of calls they had to make, indicating that they may have been planning their answers before vocalizing. This ability to control the number of calls they produce mirrors an important developmental stage in toddlers learning to count.

The results of the study, published in the journal Science, have garnered attention from biologists like Chris Templeton from Western Washington University. Templeton, who studies chickadees, suggests that the research on crows’ counting abilities opens up new possibilities for understanding animal intelligence and communication.

Overall, this study sheds light on the cognitive abilities of crows and challenges the notion that only humans are capable of complex numerical reasoning. The findings suggest that animals like crows may possess unique forms of intelligence that differ from our own, highlighting the diversity of cognitive abilities in the animal kingdom.