ArticleiScience2020
Categorical Auditory Working Memory in Crows.
Article in iScience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Switch costs reveal vocal-specific executive demands during flexible action selection in crows.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Towards a neuroethological approach to consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Exploring Neural Dynamics in the Auditory Telencephalon of Crows Using Functional Ultrasound Imaging.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Dimensions of corvid consciousness.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Jackdaws form categorical prototypes based on experience with category exemplars.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Could theropod dinosaurs have evolved to a human level of intelligence?The Journal of comparative neurology · 2023Review
- Crows protect visual working memory against interference.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Visual categories and concepts in the avian brain.Animal cognition · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to group sensory data into behaviorally meaningful classes and to maintain these perceptual categories active in working memory is key to intelligent behavior. Here, we show that carrion crows, highly vocal and cognitively advanced corvid songbirds, possess categorical auditory working memory. The crows were trained in a delayed match-to-category task that required them to flexibly match remembered sounds based on the upward or downward shift of the sounds' frequency modulation. After training, the crows instantaneously classified novel sounds into the correct auditory categories. The crows showed sharp category boundaries as a function of the relative frequency interval of the modulation. In addition, the crows generalized frequency-modulated sounds within a category and correctly classified novel sounds kept in working memory irrespective of other acoustic features of the sound. This suggests that crows can form and actively memorize auditory perceptual categories in the service of cognitive control of their goal-directed behaviors.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.