Animal behavior interests me a great deal. I essentially see the human mind as “built on” an underlying “chassis” that reflects our species’ evolutionary development. So, there is a portion of the human brain that can be considered unique, and that makes us human, but there is also a lot of our brain structure that is the same as a chimpanzee’s or other other animal’s brain. This means that by learning something about animal behavior and the animal mind, we can learn something about ourselves.
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This video on BBC involves a crow appearing to “solve” a complex-reasoning problem. After watching it, however, I question whether the conclusion that is being drawn is necessarily the correct one.
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If the crow has done each of these individual things before to get a food reward, then he may just be doing each task randomly with the expectation of getting a food reward that doesn’t pay off?
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The first seven tasks that he has associated with food reward result in nothing this time, but operant conditioning causes him to eventually do the eighth task that results in food reward. In other words, there may not be a mental connection in his mind between doing task 1 and doing task 8, like there would be for a human being.
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A question I would like to ask whoever devised this experiment: Did the crow immediately know the correct order of tasks to perform? Even if he’s doing it in the right order from the start, that could be random, because he does the task that he can immediately perform simply because it’s physically available to him, not because he’s reasoning it out. (In which case, this is just a Rube Goldberg machine with a crow as one of its components.) It would seem more likely to suggest complex reasoning if the crow had never done any of the individual tasks before and he was able to figure it out.