SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Recursive sequence generation in crows
Diana Liao*†, Katharina Brecht†, Melissa Johnston, Andreas Nieder*
Copyright © 2022
The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Words. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
Recursion, the process of embedding structures within similar structures, is often considered a foundation of symbolic competence and a uniquely human capability. To understand its evolution, we can study the recursive aptitudes of nonhuman animals. We adopted the behavioral protocol of a recent study demonstrating that humans and nonhuman primates grasp recursion. We presented sequences of bracket pair stimuli (e.g., [] and {}) to crows who were instructed to peck at training lists. They were then tested on their ability to transfer center-embedded structure to never-before-seen pairings of brackets. We reveal that crows have recursive capacities; they perform on par with children and even outperform macaques. The crows continued to produce recursive sequences after extending to longer and thus deeper embeddings. These results demonstrate that recursive capabilities are not limited to the primate genealogy and may have occured separately from or before human symbolic competence in different animal taxa.
INTRODUCTION
