Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wagener, Lysann
• Nieder, Andreas

Titel

Categorical Auditory Working Memory in Crows

Ist Teil von

• iScience, 2020-11, Vol.23 (11), p.101737-101737, Article 101737

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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. [Display omitted] •Crows performed a delayed match-to-category task with frequency modulated sounds•Crows classified novel sounds into upward or downward modulated sound categories•Crows showed sharp category boundaries and within-category generalization•Crows can actively memorize auditory perceptual categories for cognitive control Behavioral Neuroscience; Sensory Neuroscience; Cognitive Neuroscience