The social life of corvids

The mentality of crows: convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes.

Discussions of the evolution of intelligence have focused on monkeys and apes because of their close evolutionary relationship to humans. Other large-brained social animals, such as corvids, also understand their physical and social worlds. Here we review recent studies of tool manufacture, mental time travel, and social cognition in corvids, and suggest that complex cognition depends on a "too...

Eurasian jays do not copy the choices of conspecifics, but they do show evidence of stimulus enhancement

Corvids (birds in the crow family) are hypothesised to have a general cognitive tool-kit because they show a wide range of transferrable skills across social, physical and temporal tasks, despite differences in socioecology. However, it is unknown whether relatively asocial corvids differ from social corvids in their use of social information in the context of copying the choices of others, bec...

For Corvids together Is Better - A Model of Cooperation in Evolutionary Robotics

Sommario In this paper we describe a model of cooperation in Evolutionary Robotics (ER) derived by animal research on Corvids. In recent years many researchers have proposed models of ER which are bioinspired. The main source of inspiration has come from social insects, such as ants. Inspiration may come also from other representatives in the animal kingdom, that are quite different from insect...

Spatial and Social Cognition in Corvids: An Evolutionary Approach

Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in birds.

The 'social intelligence hypothesis' was originally conceived to explain how primates may have evolved their superior intellect and large brains when compared with other animals. Although some birds such as corvids may be intellectually comparable to apes, the same relationship between sociality and brain size seen in primates has not been found for birds, possibly suggesting a role for other n...

Out of Gondwanaland; the evolutionary history of cooperative breeding and social behaviour among crows, magpies, jays and allies.

Cooperative breeding is comparatively rare among birds in the mainly temperate and boreal Northern Hemisphere. Here we test if the distribution of breeding systems reflects a response to latitude by means of a phylogenetic analysis using correlates with geographical range among the corvids (crows, jays, magpies and allied groups). The corvids trace their ancestry to the predominantly cooperativ...