New research shows: Crows can 'read' numbers from 1 to 4

New findings help us better understand the intelligence of crows, animals that always excite scientists.

The study's lead author, Diana Liao, a neurobiologist and senior researcher at the University of Tübingen lab (Germany), said the study was inspired by young children just learning to count.

Scientists discovered that crows can "count" numbers from 1 to 4 - (Photo: AI).

Toddlers use number words to count the number of objects in front of them. If they see three toys in front of them, their count might sound like "one, two, three" or "one, one, one."

To find stronger evidence for animals' ability to count sounds , Liao and his colleagues studied crows, animals with excellent vocal abilities and the ability to understand complex mathematical concepts.

The team trained three carnivorous crows ( Corvus corone ) over 160 sessions.

During training, the crows had to learn to make associations between a series of randomly arranged visual and auditory cues - visual being Arabic numbers and auditory cues being the sounds of different musical instruments .

They are taught to recognize that each signal corresponds to a certain number of chirps from one to four. After making sounds (such as chirps four times for a sound or symbol associated with four chirps), they will peck at the display screen to signal they have completed the exercise.

Diagram illustrating the experiment - (Photo: Liao et al.).

As a result, the researchers found that all three crows could produce the correct number of calls in response to the signals. If they answer incorrectly, it's usually because they make mistakes between numbers that are relatively close together, like three and four.

"Our results demonstrate that crows can produce a flexible and deliberate number of guided sounds using an 'approximate number system'." 

This ability of crows also mirrors the counting skills of toddlers before they learn to understand number words. This skill sets the stage for real counting, where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system," the researchers wrote.

The research was published in the journal Science .