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Social learning spreads knowledge about dangerous humans among American crows
Heather N Cornell1, John M Marzluff, Shannon Pecoraro
1School of Forest Resources, College of the Environment, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Proceedings. Biological Sciences
|July 1, 2011
Summary
American crows learn to recognize dangerous faces through both direct experience and social learning. Direct experience leads to more precise discrimination than social learning, enhancing survival.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral Ecology
- Animal Cognition
- Evolutionary Biology
Background:
- Individuals balance acquiring costly firsthand information against using cheaper social information.
- American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) utilize both information sources to identify dangerous individuals.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how American crows learn to recognize dangerous human faces.
- To differentiate between individual, vertical, and horizontal social learning in crows.
- To compare the accuracy of learned information from direct versus social exposure.
Main Methods:
- Wild crows were exposed to a novel 'dangerous face' mask during trapping and banding.
- Observed scolding responses to the mask by previously captured crows (individual learning) and uncaptured crows (social learning).
- Assessed recognition accuracy and spread of learned information over time and distance.
Main Results:
- Crows demonstrated individual learning through immediate scolding after trapping.
- Horizontal social learning was inferred from recognition by uncaptured crows.
- Vertical social learning was evident through young crows scolding the mask after parental conditioning.
- Crows with direct experience showed more precise discrimination between dangerous and neutral masks than socially learned crows.
- Scolding behavior doubled in frequency and spread over 1.2 km within five years at one site.
Conclusions:
- American crows effectively learn to identify threats using both direct experience and social information.
- Direct learning confers higher accuracy in threat recognition compared to social learning.
- Learned threat recognition facilitates rapid information spread within crow populations, enhancing collective safety.
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