Research at the KLF

Reasoning in birds

funded by: FWF (P20538-B17)

project leaders: Prof. Dr. Kurt Kotrschal & Dr. Christian Schloegl

Corvids and parrots possess advanced cognitive abilities. Both groups possess similar sized brains, with those areas enlarged which are supposed to be important for advanced cognitive abilities ("cognitive cerebrotype"; Iwaniuk & Hurd 2005). Corvids and parrots possess prolonged juvenile periods, form complex fission-fusion societies and are extremly long-living. In the corvids, the competition over food caches has been suggested to be the driving force for the evolution of their advanced cognitive abilities. Parrots, in contrast, do not cache food and do not compete with conspecifics over food sources regularly. In the past, most cognitive research on birds focused on the cognitive domains each species had been suspected to be specialised in, i.e. ravens had been tested in caching-related tasks, New Caledonian crows in tasks related to tool-use, etc. Comparative research, however, has been neglected mainly.

With this project, we will our expand our research to various corvid and parrot species, to gain an comparative overview of the cognitive abilities of the different species. Within this project, reasoning, i.e. the ability to infer missing information by deduction from available information, will be of particular interest.