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Corvid intelligence: study shows crows understanding geometry [1]

['Gail Sherman']

Date: 2025-04-17

Crows are objectively awesome—leaving gifts for humans who prove themselves worthy, exploring interspecies friendships and learning to count—and a new study on corvid intelligence published in Science Advances shows they have at least a rudimentary understanding of geometry. In "Crows recognize geometric regularity", Philipp Schmidbauer, Madita Hahn, and Andreas Nieder demonstrate the birds' ability to recognize geometric shapes. This skill was previously thought to be unique to humans. Even other primates have not been found to have this capability.

The study demonstrated that carrion crows possess a fundamental geometric intuition like humans. The researchers trained crows to identify an "intruder" shape that differed from others. When presented with quadrilaterals, the crows could immediately identify shapes that had different geometric properties from the rest of the set.

The crows performed better when presented with right angles, parallel lines, or symmetry as opposed to more irregular shapes, displaying a "geometric regularity effect" that emerged without specific training. The crows were able to distinguish geometric regularity in shapes, which suggests that this intuition is not uniquely human, and has deeper roots in biological evolution.

The paper's abstract follows:

The perception of geometric regularity in shapes, a form of elementary Euclidean geometry, is a fundamental mathematical intuition in humans. We demonstrate this geometric understanding in an animal, the carrion crow. Crows were trained to detect a visually distinct intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were able to immediately apply this intruder concept to quadrilaterals, identifying the one that exhibited differing geometric properties compared to the others in the set. The crows exhibited a geometric regularity effect, showing better performance with shapes featuring right angles, parallel lines, or symmetry over more irregular shapes. This performance advantage did not require learning. Our findings suggest that geometric intuitions are not specific to humans but are deeply rooted in biological evolution.

Previously:

• Scientists observe evidence of actual counting crows

• Clever crow plays Connect Four

• Crows hold 'funerals' for their dead and this very weird experiment revealed why

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