Topic: jackdaws

Recent research has shown that corvids have comparable cognitive abilities to primates and even human children. However, birds differ significantly from mammals in brain size and structure, making them an interesting but also important model organism for comparing cognitive abilities across species. Corvids learn their vocalizations form their parents and other tutors and do not lose the ability to learn or mimic sounds over their lives. Beside that very little is known about the vocal cognition and behavior of these birds.I will show initial evidence that corvid and human vocalizations share

In complex environments, individuals need to be able to selectively focus on relevant information and to maintain it for later use. Attention and working memory (WM) represent two core cognitive abilities that are involved in cognitive control. Higher cognitive abilities have mostly been demonstrated in primates, yet corvid songbirds show remarkably similar skills. Therefore, we used jackdaws to study these instances of cognitive control. Two jackdaws were trained on a delayed estimation paradigm, tailored to probe attention and WM processes. One of two simultaneously presented sample colors h