Amazing stuff! How smart are crows, we humans wonder since ancient times!
"Humans have an innate sense for geometry. ...
Researchers first had the clever corvids learn to peck at a particular shape, like a [circle], to get a treat. Then they placed that shape amidst four different ones—stars, for instance. When the birds had no trouble spotting the outlier, the team jacked up the difficulty, asking the animals to spot an irregular quadrilateral amongst a sea of squares. Though monkeys previously failed at this test, the birds excelled. ..."
From the abstract:
"The perception of geometric regularity in shapes, a form of elementary Euclidean geometry, is a fundamental mathematical intuition in humans.
We demonstrate this geometric understanding in an animal, the carrion crow. Crows were trained to detect a visually distinct intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were able to immediately apply this intruder concept to quadrilaterals, identifying the one that exhibited differing geometric properties compared to the others in the set.
The crows exhibited a geometric regularity effect, showing better performance with shapes featuring right angles, parallel lines, or symmetry over more irregular shapes. This performance advantage did not require learning. Our findings suggest that geometric intuitions are not specific to humans but are deeply rooted in biological evolution."
Crows recognize geometric regularity (open access)
Fig. 1. Intruder detection task.
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