Crows exhibit advanced relational thinking

Crows have long been heralded for their high intelligence; they can remember faces, use tools and communicate in sophisticated ways. Crows have the brain power to solve higher-order, relational-matching tasks, and they can do so spontaneously, according to new research. That means crows join humans, apes and monkeys in exhibiting advanced relational thinking, according to the research. But a newly published study finds crows also have the brain power to solve higher-order, relational-matching tasks, and they can do so spontaneously. Analogical reasoning, matching relations to relations, has been considered to be among the more so called ‘higher order’ abstract reasoning processes. For decades such reasoning has been thought to be limited to humans and some great apes. The apparent spontaneity of this finding makes it all the more remarkable. There will be skeptics and hopes the experiment will be repeated with more crows as well as other species.