ArticleScience advances2022
Recursive sequence generation in crows.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Structure Beneath the Symbols: How Children Develop an Understanding of Place Value.Current directions in psychological science · 2026Article
- Inhibitory-stabilization is sufficient for history-dependent computation in a randomly connected attractor network.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Inhibitory-stabilization is sufficient for history-dependent computation in a randomly connected attractor network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Acquisition and Utilization of Recursive Rules in Motor Sequence Generation.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Do Humans Use Push-Down Stacks When Learning or Producing Center-Embedded Sequences?Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Third-order self-embedded vocal motifs in wild orangutans, and the selective evolution of recursion.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Sequences and animal intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Crows recognize geometric regularity.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Associative learning accounts for recursive-structure generation in crows.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Costs and benefits of voluntary attention in crows.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Generative cultural learning in children and adults: the role of compositionality and generativity in cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing in Human Adults.Cognitive science · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recursion, the process of embedding structures within similar structures, is often considered a foundation of symbolic competence and a uniquely human capability. To understand its evolution, we can study the recursive aptitudes of nonhuman animals. We adopted the behavioral protocol of a recent study demonstrating that humans and nonhuman primates grasp recursion. We presented sequences of bracket pair stimuli (e.g., [ ] and { }) to crows who were instructed to peck at training lists. They were then tested on their ability to transfer center-embedded structure to never-before-seen pairings of brackets. We reveal that crows have recursive capacities; they perform on par with children and even outperform macaques. The crows continued to produce recursive sequences after extending to longer and thus deeper embeddings. These results demonstrate that recursive capabilities are not limited to the primate genealogy and may have occurred separately from or before human symbolic competence in different animal taxa.
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