Iron Crows' Nests

Replaceable Nests

Clever crows or unbalanced birds?

Taylor et al. (1) claimed that New Caledonian crows are capable of reasoning about “hidden causal agents.” Their recorded increases in hide inspections and abandoned trials in the unknown causal agent (UCA) condition relative to the human causal agent (HCA) condition, which were used to infer the presence of “causal reasoning” ability, are, however, confounded by a fundamental methodological li...

Dennett, Darwin, and Skinner Crows

The central theme of this paper is the scientific viewpoint taken for understanding behavioral processes. Two classical viewpoints are formulated by Dennett (the intentional stance) and Tinbergen (Tinbergen’s four questions). In this paper we argue that the two different viewpoints are linked to the two different processes that underlie complex behavior, namely, the instruction process and the ...

Crows Spontaneously Exhibit Analogical Reasoning

Analogical reasoning is vital to advanced cognition and behavioral adaptation. Many theorists deem analogical thinking to be uniquely human and to be foundational to categorization, creative problem solving, and scientific discovery. Comparative psychologists have long been interested in the species generality of analogical reasoning, but they initially found it difficult to obtain empirical su...

Coupled Resonator Optical Waveguides (CROWs)

We investigate theoretically and experimentally the characteristics, performance and possible applications of coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROWs). The ability to engineer the dispersion properties of a CROW and especially the ability to realize ultra-slow group velocities paves the way for various applications such as delay lines, optical memories and all-optical switching. Simple anal...