Abstract
SummaryThe 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.
Highlights
Categorical working memory, the ability to group sensory data into behaviorally meaningful classes and to maintain them active in working memory for a future goal, is key to intelligent behavior (Miller et al, 2018)
SUMMARY 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
We show that carrion crows, highly vocal and cognitively advanced corvid songbirds, possess categorical auditory working memory
Summary
Categorical working memory, the ability to group sensory data into behaviorally meaningful classes and to maintain them active in working memory for a future goal, is key to intelligent behavior (Miller et al, 2018). It allows humans and animals to classify, memorize, and process sensory information efficiently. This enables humans and cognitively advanced animals to quickly adapt to new situations (Miller et al, 2003). Categorical working memory in animals has primarily been demonstrated in the visual domain. In classical working memory tasks, monkeys and crows flexibly switch between remembered visual categories, such as ‘‘leftward versus rightward motion’’ (Zhou and Freedman, 2019), ‘‘cats versus dogs’’ (Freedman et al, 2001), or ‘‘same versus different’’ (Wallis et al, 2001; Veit and Nieder, 2013). Whether categorical working memory is found in the auditory domain is currently unknown
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