Study shows crows able to infer actions of hidden agent
(Phys.org)—The more scientists study animals and their intellectual abilities, the more it appears that many of them have heretofore unknown abilities that can match some of our own. One such animal is the New Caledonian crow which has been found to not only make and use tools, but to fashion them depending on which bird "culture" it happens to live in. The unusually big brained bird has also been found to live in nuclear families and some observers have suggested they even have some degree of affection for one another. For these reasons, a team of researchers from several countries got together to study their inferential skills, and as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found the birds had an ability that until now was thought limited exclusively to us humans.