News Detail

Loma Pendergraft discusses what happens to crows’ brains when they use tools in a recent KUOW article

Previous studies of crow intelligence found that they have subjective experiences, can create their own tools, and can even learn to count out loud. However, the question of how crows, who lack a prefrontal cortex, are capable of high-level thinking [was] “always was kind of the black box,” said John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington who has pioneered the study of crow intelligence. “When they do these really great things, is it just some more robotic response or is it really a reasoned response?”

Marzluff and lab were the first to look at crow brains during experiments using a PET scan, a noninvasive technology that uses a radioactive tracer to detect which parts of a brain are active at a given moment.

Pendergraft, who studied with Marzloff lab and now teaches behavior courses for UW Psychology, is utilizing the same technique to look at the brain of an American crow while it uses tools--in this case, dropping pebbles into a pitcher until the water level rose enough to grab the reward--a Cheeto. 

“Those four birds that had fully mastered the task, we saw a complete shift in brain activity compared to their less-capable peers,” Pendergraft said. “It switched over to areas of their brain that are associated with muscle memory and motor control.”

Read the full KUOW article here: https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-crows-are-so-smart-they-re-challenging-what-we-know-about-evolution