ArticleScientific reports2018
Mental template matching is a potential cultural transmission mechanism for New Caledonian crow tool manufacturing traditions.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Some Hooded crows (Corvus cornix) understand how a loose string works.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- NSF Workshop Report: Exploring Measurements and Interpretations of Intelligent Behaviors Across Animal Model Systems.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Hooded crows (Corvus cornix) manufacture objects relative to a mental template.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Individual preferences for sound tool design in a parrot.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Social influences on delayed gratification in New Caledonian crows and Eurasian jays.PloS one · 2023Article
- Technical reasoning is important for cumulative technological culture.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Object manufacture based on a memorized template: Goffin's cockatoos attend to different model features.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Innovative problem solving in macaws.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- One Function One Tool? A Review on Mutual Exclusivity in Tool Use Learning in Human and Non-human Species.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Teaching varies with task complexity in wild chimpanzees.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Macphail's Null Hypothesis of Vertebrate Intelligence: Insights From Avian Cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Social learning about construction behaviour via an artefact.Animal cognition · 2019Article
- Raw-material selectivity in hook-tool-crafting New Caledonian crows.Biology letters · 2019Article
- New Caledonian crows infer the weight of objects from observing their movements in a breeze.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when social traditions accumulate improvements over time. In humans cumulative cultural evolution is thought to depend on a unique suite of cognitive abilities, including teaching, language and imitation. Tool-making New Caledonian crows show some hallmarks of cumulative culture; but this claim is contentious, in part because these birds do not appear to imitate. One alternative hypothesis is that crows' tool designs could be culturally transmitted through a process of mental template matching. That is, individuals could use or observe conspecifics' tools, form a mental template of a particular tool design, and then reproduce this in their own manufacture - a process analogous to birdsong learning. Here, we provide the first evidence supporting this hypothesis, by demonstrating that New Caledonian crows have the cognitive capacity for mental template matching. Using a novel manufacture paradigm, crows were first trained to drop paper into a vending machine to retrieve rewards. They later learnt that only items of a particular size (large or small templates) were rewarded. At test, despite being rewarded at random, and with no physical templates present, crows manufactured items that were more similar in size to previously rewarded, than unrewarded, templates. Our results provide the first evidence that this cognitive ability may underpin the transmission of New Caledonian crows' natural tool designs.
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