Self-awareness

Language & Communication, Self-awareness, Theory of Mind

Can Crows Read Signs?

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Can crows read signs?

Wild crows were stealing insulation—to use in their nests—from a construction site on the campus of the International Coastal Research Center (ICRC) in Otsuchi, Japan.

The staff at the research center asked Tsutomu Takeda, a crow expert at Utsunomiya University, for advice. Takeda suggested they hang paper signs that read “crows do not enter.” (No, he wasn’t joking.) The crows immediately stopped stealing the insulation and have refrained for two years now.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the crows can read Japanese, but it raises some intriguing questions. Studies have shown that crows pay attention to human behavior and adjust their own in response. So it’s possible that the signs—which cause people to look up and then look around for crows—makes the crows nervous and they decided it’s no longer safe to steal the insulation. So while the clever corvids are not reading the words (at least we don’t think they are!), they may nonetheless be reading the behavioral signs of the humans on campus.

Read the full story on The Asahi Shimbun’s website.

Imagination & Play, Self-awareness

Magpie Hide-and-Seek: A Theory of Mind?

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Magpies are an intelligent, social, self-aware species capable of reasoning, strategy, foresight, altruism, and other behaviors not previously associated with birds. They also play a mean game of hide-and-seek.

Lots of animals stalk and ambush one another during play, but magpies actually play hide-and-seek the same way we do. They take turns concealing themselves, peek out from their hiding places, and call out to their companion when they are ready to be found.

Being able to play hide-and-seek suggests (along with other magpie behaviors) that magpies have a “theory of mind,” which is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. It allows a human or nonhuman animal to recognize its mind as separate from other minds and to understand that others have their own mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and perspectives. Theory of mind is also called “perspective taking” because it involves imagining the perspective of another. In order to play hide-and-seek, one needs to understand the intentions (she is trying to find me) of another.

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Problem-solving, Self-awareness

Self-Aware Until Proven Otherwise

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Four years ago, ethologist and animal advocate Marc Bekoff wrote an op-ed for LiveScience titled “After 2,500 Studies, It’s Time to Declare Animal Sentience Proven.” In this essay, Bekoff points out that the ample empirical evidence supporting animal sentience (over 2,500 studies at the time he was writing and many more than that now) still wasn’t stopping skeptics from continuing to question—and even deny—what research had already proven.

What puzzles me is why science didn’t start off with a different principal for how we view self-awareness in animals, one closer to that used by the American criminal justice system, which holds innocence as the presumption unless guilt is proven. Instead of needing proof of self-awareness in animals, we could instead assume that an animal is self-aware unless proven otherwise. After all, this assumption better reflects our observations of and experiences with animals, who certainly behave as if they are self aware.

But the skepticism lingers. . . And this is why we owe a debt of gratitude to all the scientists who continue to design ingenious ways of demonstrating that animals are self-aware, experience emotions, and have incredibly cognitive abilities.

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