Stress Relief: Brainy crows ace card game
Crows can remember faces and use tools. Now new research shows they also have the brain power to spontaneously solve higher-order matching tasks—without being trained to do so. That means crows join humans, apes, and monkeys in exhibiting advanced relational thinking.
“What the crows have done is a phenomenal feat,” says Ed Wasserman, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa and corresponding author of the study. “That’s the marvel of the results. It’s been done before with apes and monkeys, but now we’re dealing with a bird; but not just any bird, a bird with a brain as special to birds as the brain of an apes is special to mammals.”
