Juvenile ravens performed just as well as chimps and orangutans in a battery of intelligence tests—except for assays of spatial skills. Christopher Intagliata reports.
在一系列的智力测验中，乌鸦的表现与黑猩猩和猩猩一样，但对空间技能的测验除外。Christopher Intagliata报告。
Ravens are known for their exceptional intelligence—in fact, they’re sometimes called “flying primates.”
乌鸦以其卓越的智力而著称-实际上，它们有时被称为“飞行的灵长类动物”。
“We knew they are very smart, but nobody had really tested this using a big and comprehensive test battery, which also then really enabled us to say, ‘Is their cognitive performance similar to those of great apes or not?’”
“我们知道他们非常聪明，但是没有人真正使用大型而全面的测试电池进行过测试，这也确实使我们能够说，'他们的认知表现是否与大猿猴相似？”
Simone Pika is a cognitive scientist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. She and her colleagues wanted to see how ravens would measure up to primates across a wide array of tasks, so they subjected eight ravens to something called the Primate Cognition Test Battery—a series of 33 different tasks designed to assess various aspects of intelligence among primates.
西蒙妮·皮卡（Simone Pika）是德国奥斯纳布吕克大学的认知科学家。她和她的同事们想看看乌鸦如何在各种各样的任务中测量出灵长类动物，因此他们对八只乌鸦进行了一次称为“灵长类动物认知测试电池”的试验-一系列33种不同的任务，旨在评估灵长类动物智力的各个方面。
For example, one test is a game of cups you might have seen at a fair—put an object under one of three cups, move the cups around and guess which cup the object is under. Other tasks tested the ravens’ ability to determine cause and effect or to understand different quantities. Peanuts were a popular test item to keep the birds motivated.
例如，一项测试是一场您可能在展览会上见过的杯子游戏，将一个物体放在三个杯子之一的下面，移动杯子，然后猜测该对象在哪个杯子下面。其他任务测试了乌鸦确定原因和结果或了解不同数量的能力。花生是保持鸟类动力的流行测试项目。
Overall the researchers found that four-month-old ravens, which you might think of as “teenage” ravens, did just as well on most tasks as adult chimps and orangutans—except on tests of spatial skills.
总体而言，研究人员发现，四个月大的乌鸦（您可能会把它们称为“青少年”乌鸦）在成年黑猩猩和猩猩的大多数任务上表现出色，除了对空间技能的测试。
“And that was a little surprising to us. But we used a test battery that was designed to test primate cognition. And these are tasks which may make sense for human children and great apes. And now we use this for a species which is very different. They are flying; they have beaks, communicate with beaks, don’t have hands. So I would say here maybe the task we used to test their spatial skills could be improved.”
“这令我们有些惊讶。但是我们使用了旨在测试灵长类动物认知的测试电池。这些都是人类儿童和大猿可能有意义的任务。现在我们将其用于非常不同的物种。他们在飞；他们有喙，与喙交流，没有手。因此，我在这里说，也许我们用来测试他们的空间技能的任务可能会得到改善。”
The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports. [Simone Pika et al., Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills]
结果显示在《科学报告》杂志上。[西蒙·皮卡（Simone Pika）等人，《乌鸦》（Ravens）在生理和社交认知能力上与大猿并列]
Kaeli Swift is a behavioral ecologist who studies crows and other corvids at the University of Washington. She says she was impressed by the results—and how comprehensive the tests were—but says it can be hard to assess intelligence by comparing across species.
凯莉·斯威夫特（Kaeli Swift）是一名行为生态学家，他在华盛顿大学研究乌鸦和其他柯菲犬。她说，结果和测试的全面性给她留下了深刻的印象，但她说，很难通过比较物种来评估智力。
“I’d like to see a shift in our language from comparing ravens to primates, like calling them flying primates, to rethinking how we scale animals—and not putting them on such a linear scale, right, where we’re like, ‘Wow, birds are as smart as apes. That’s amazing. Who would have thought?’ It’s like, well, there’s a bunch of really smart animals, and their natural history informs a lot of their physical and social cognition. And it’s much less linear than the narrative we often tell.”
“我希望看到我们的语言已经发生了变化，从将乌鸦与灵长类动物进行比较（例如称它们为飞行灵长类动物）到重新思考如何缩放动物，而不是将它们线性地缩放，对，就像我们这样，哇，鸟像猿一样聪明。太棒了。谁曾想到？' 就像，有一堆真正聪明的动物一样，它们的自然历史告诉了他们许多生理和社会认知。而且它比我们经常讲的叙述少线性。”
Animal intelligence, she says, is much more complex and variable than we think.
她说，动物智能比我们想象的要复杂得多，而且变化多端。