At only four months old, young ravens could already rival the cognitive performance of adult great apes. The study, led by Simone Pika of the University of Osnabruck, Germany, analyzed the cognitive performance of the birds in a series of tests that aims to explore the mechanisms of how ravens understand the physical world and interact with each other.
The repeated tests examined how the hand-raised ravens perform in the aspects of spatial memory, object permanence, relative, and addition. Also, they looked at the ability of the way birds communicate and learn from a human experimenter.
Overall, they found that the skills ravens showed were similar in ages of four to 16 weeks which suggests that their cognitive performance starts to develop rapidly in their first four months. Researchers explained that this age is the time when the birds become more independent from their parents and start discovering their ecological and social environment.
Best In Numerical Tasks and Worse In Spatial Memory
According to a report of Scientific American, the researchers tested the eight hand-raised birds on nine physical categories and six social ones. They tested how the birds were to track objects and understand numbers by conducting physical tests which involved placing a reward under a cup and then move that cup around with other cups to see if ravens could track the reward.
They noted the social cues given by the experimenter that the birds could follow, like signaling which cup has the reward by looking or painting the cup. They also showed the ravens how to access the reward and see if the bird could follow and apply it.
They repeated the same 33 tasks for each raven when the birds were still four, eight, 12, and 16 weeks. Astonishingly, the ravens have mastered almost all the tasks given to them by the age of four months. In general, they performed best in addition and understanding numbers but performed worst in spatial memory.
Comparing it to the performance of chimpanzees and orangutans, the researchers said that the cognitive development of the ravens must be fast-tracked because the age of four months is the time when ravens start to engage in their ecological and social environments. The cognitive performance of ravens was similar to those of the great apes, with exception of spatial memory.
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Not Representative to the Whole Population
The researchers suggest that ravens may have evolved sophisticated cognitive skills in response to living in a constantly changing environment, in which they need to cooperate and form alliances with fellow ravens for their survival and reproduction.
But they cautioned that the findings of their study might not be representative of the whole population of the ravens, given that the birds involved in the study were in the captive environment which significantly differs from those in the wild, MailOnline reported.
"Ravens are quick learners, and these ones had been hand-raised by humans, but there still is a dinosaur-mammal void between the species, which has to be overcome," says Mathias Osvath, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden.
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