The fascinating intelligence of birds | Auguste von Bayern | TEDxTUM

[Music] I'm a cognitive zoologist and I'm going to talk about intelligent birds today and therefore I thought I better introduce you to one right away this is doly she is a jackor and belongs to the coritz The Crow family that's one of the two families bird families with the largest brains relative to their body to yeah maybe you can't imagine that this little head has the cognitive cap the brain capacity like that of a great ape and to many people grow and and another reason why I brought I have to say because I wanted her to be the first Cor in a TED Talk there has been a c um parrot before and I thought it's about time for CO as well if she now doesn't come back to me then don't worry then I pick her up in the break but don't worry she's she's not she's not dangerous because as you see doly she been find a place to sit and then I'll pick her up later just do me the favor and and and keep the doors closed so um so to many crows don't have the most positive image but why that is I never understood I find them highly fascinating birds and I'm intrigued by their social um by their complex social life and in fact um doly was brought to me when she was a chick because she had fallen out of the nest prematurely and I handre her and that established a very special bond between us um and this Bond still lasts although she's paired for many years with a jackor maale the ability to form bonds is very typical of jackor and of kids they form long-term friendships and lifelong pair bonds they recognize former group members for many years and they virtually Inseparable from their partner and um are very um tender toward watching each other um talk but the most fascinating thing about crows is their intelligence and talking about dors they are for example extremely sensitive to eye orientation and they recognize attentional States um even if it's a person and not a bird they also use it in they use eye orientation in um as communicative signals but they also in competitive situations reason about the um perspective of others and consider their knowledge States so they they show aspects of a theory so-called theory of mind that's uh something that develops in human children quite late so and the past decades have seen a major increase in research on the animal mind um and until the '90s these studies largely focused on primates our closest relatives and they revealed that they exhibit many cognitive abilities um that have originally considered to be uniquely human and that's not so surprising considering that our last ancestor lived only 6 million years ago and that we share the majority of our genome but when throughout the last 15 years it had it has been shown that crows and also parrots parallel the great IPS in cognitive ability this was of major significance and it the implication of it is that intelligence not just evolves in our lineage but several times independently and interestingly this is also matched in if you look at brain size in the vertebrates in addition to our lineage the primates there's three more groups that stand off for the large relative brains to in relation to their body and very surprisingly this includes two bird groups grows and parrots and I mean their last ancestors their last shared ancestor with us lived around 300 million years ago so this is amazing and it it shows that um studying cors in parot um might they might be very good candidates for studying the evolution of complex cognition to many this is worrying because some people still want to draw a clearcut line between animals and humans I mean we are certainly very very special but we are still a primate species and we have an evolutionary past as a cognitive scientist I find it hugely fascinating to to try to trying to understand how and why we became so special and why our brain expanded not so very long ago all of a sudden and became enormously big we have the the largest brain relative to body size of all animals and we are very special because we we are the most by far the most Innovative being on the planet and we can realize we can realize cognit we can realize what is otherwise merely potential but foremost we can recognize potential and we can dream up theoretical possibilities Julie yeah come here we can dream up theoretical possibilities and and slightly distracting for me because she's now calling for me doie um well um but so we we humans have the ability to to dream up words and we can escape our natural limitations to an extent that animals could never do they don't need many behavioral they don't need much behavioral flexibility in their daily lives they live they typically live this a largely predictable life within the limits of their species typical behavioral repertoire so they eat they sleep they repr use but you wouldn't think of them they wouldn't certainly think that they want to go for the moon for example and make plans to realize that like we do but on the other hand there are living conditions on the on the planet that make might require cognitive flexibility and the ability to be spontaneous it might might be um important for survival for example in harsh complex and unpredictable environment ments it might be it might pay off to be Innovative and clever and we are not the only species that are subject to this but the big question is to to what extent other species might had have evolved complex cognitive abilities that allow them to cope with novel situations very quickly I give you two particularly astonishing examples of such flexible behaviors in two representatives in representative of two of the largest brained Aven families I'm going to talk about new Caledonian crows an island species that lives um that uses tools habitually for stick tools habitually for retrieving their food and also about gothen cockus a particularly Innovative and um explorative parrot species living on the tanin bar islands and I'm starting with one of the best studies to date showing that animals might be able to think about cause and effect to some extent and make and causely interfere to solve novel problems here we exposed the birds to food Out Of Reach on a plat presented on a platform inside of a transparent box and there's a tube on top of the box so please put yourselves in the in the perspective of the bird it might be seem very simple to you at first side but consider that they cannot lift or shake this box and also we humans might we we might comprehend from just looking at this box seeing the hinges and the magnets that this the platform can be collapsed but if you don't know that the platform can be collapsed it doesn't make any sense to drop stones into this tube which is obviously the solution to the problem so um we first established that none of our new Caledonian crows solved that problem without any experience of the mechanism none of them did and crows don't use stone tools habitually in the wild but then we subjected them to um two experimental groups that um that were allowed to learn certain aspects of this problem so one group was trained to notch stones from the rim and into the tube right into its mouth and so they were they were conditioned to carry out the prec the correct behaviors and they knew that Stones were important and that they had to go into the mouth of the tube now she's complaining J the other group they they only learned indirectly about just the mechanism of of this task they they had to push the platform down directly with their beak through a shortened tube but importantly they never ever learned anything about Stones being important they were never reinforced for touching Stones so what do you think um which of the two groups solved the problem not so surprisingly the first group that had been trained to nutch stones into the tube um succeeded but their only transfer was to consisted in picking up stones and carrying to the mouth of the tube before dropping it but also the other there were animals from the other group that succeeded and they suddenly decided to use tools Stones spontaneously as novel tools to solve this problem and this is remarkable because they've never interacted with stones before it actually shows that they were reasoning about the mechanistic structure of the problem and about physical forces gravity and pressure and we're putting the two flexibly into relation until they came up with the right solution spontaneously and I show you how this look like in reality this is first the training phase where the bird learns to push down the platform with its beak so it learns about the collapsibility and next it's exposed to the original test again where the tube where there's a long tube on top of the box and you can see that in the beginning it's fairly annoyed that suddenly it can't reach the platform with it paks any longer but yes doly is annoyed too so but then it clicks and suddenly she uses a tool and uses and ex with it extends it reach next I'm going to talk to probably one of the most amazing Innovative behaviors spontaneously shown by an animal reported to Da and that is by an goffen cocka two a species that does not use tools in the wild and um this was a chance observation by my sister Elise Ur who observed that um figero a coatu was playing with a little Stone and he was in at some stage he was inserting it through the mesh of the aing and it fell just outside of his reach and then he tried for a few moments to retrieve it with his claws but when this was not successful he said he suddenly went away and came back with a little stick and then tried to fish for the toy off out of his reach and when after this happened there was of course a follow-up study and after this happened he was immediately separated from his peers and tested under more controlled conditions the bird was tested with a peanut his favorite food and was just placed outside of the Avery behind the mesh and to our big astonishment the bird did not go and fetch the tool that we had provided but instead he started cutting out a wooden splinter out of the wooden beam of the Avary step by step and then used the Splinter to um now she's bored if you want to know this is they start singing when they're bought um so then he used that splinter to fish for the food out of reach and um but see for yourself please um so you can see that it's pretty uh pretty tedious um pretty tedious to bite out the Splinter and it suggests that he really acted in a gold directed Manner and you'll also see that it's not exactly easy to maneuver such a tool with a curved beak we had to help him a little bit but um then he it's not exactly easy to maneuver it but he if you look closely he used his tongue to support the tool against his upper beak to to have more control of the grip we replicated his behavior but he used several different methods and different materials flexibly so we really had the impression that he had some kind of inner some kind of template in front of his inner eyes and was um shap um going um really producing the tools According to some plan um of course we we can't show that and future research will have to study in more detail the cognitive processes that underly such complex Innovative Behavior but um he definitely shaped a novel tool out of a shapeless Source material and to fulfill a novel need and that's that meets the definition of real tool Innovation and it's maybe interesting for to know for you to know that this is a behavior that tool Innovations are um developing very late in human ayny while children readily start using tools at an early age they only invent a tool readily when they're about um 5 to8 years of age so this is surprising so I hope that I could show to you that there's um large Brain burst species have evolved capacities for complex thoughts processes that allow them to respond to novel situation flexibly and that um allow them to solve novel problems but um this might be hard to swallow for some people that um want to make a big distinction between animals and humans um but actually I think I think there is a big a fundamental difference between us and animals and that is that we are the only species that can fully foresee the consequences of our own actions and as a consequence we are only also the only species that carries the full responsibility for our own actions and therefore my appeal to you is if you want to be different then show it and take responsibility for your actions for the sake of this planet and all species living on it thank [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 244,009

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Science (hard), Animals, Birds, Brain, Cognitive science, Communication, Exploration, Intelligence, Relationships, Science

Id: 3uLp0C6G__w

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017