this study wasn't to see if crows could drop shit in water after watching somebody else do that (which any social-species dumbfuck can do), it was to see if they were smart enough to care about which shit to drop and where to drop it when that suddenly ...

this study wasn't to see if crows could drop shit in water after watching somebody else do that (which any social-species dumbfuck can do), it was to see if they were smart enough to care about which shit to drop and where to drop it when that suddenly became important

note that some of the shit in the gif is hollow and therefore useless for displacement and some of the shit is solid. the crows ignore the hollow shit because fuck wasting time

the researchers deliberately used newly-caught crows from the wild to avoid the risk of using crows who'd learned something from previous tests, because the whole point was to test actual understanding of displacement, not simple mimicry or training. that's why if you read the methods sections, you see that crows are trained to do all the more basic bullshit like "drop stone in container" and "realize the testing equipment will not try to eat you" but for the actual experiment there is no training, it's just "here's this new aspect, you're either going to have to be absurdly lucky or have some actual understanding to impress us here, have fun with that asshole"

in one task involving a "u-tube" device, almost all the crows were in fact fucking morons with no clue how to win, there was just one youngass crow who was so goddamn smart she figured the system out. she also came when her name was called and when she was pointed at, even though many fully-grown crows are too dumb for that. basically she's a child prodigy and will grow up to enslave us all so you better start hoarding shiny objects and peanuts to curry her favor, fool

Here's a link to an article explaining everything complete with links to the full texts of the original research papers, fuck yeah open access

Posted by Guest on Mon Jul 20 04:49:58 2015

Derp How do you think humans learn? From observing other people.

That then means that somewhere down the line a human had to be the first to figure it out

The was no one around to teach the first humans, we figured it out by ourselves

Posted by Guest on Mon Jul 20 02:38:55 2015