The ability that was believed to be human and that an animal would also have: what is it about?

For many years, it has been argued that what separates humans from animals is their capacity for reasoning. However, it's also true that some animals adopt human practices; in fact, there are some actions that were once thought to be performed only by humans, but research has revealed that this isn't always the case. See more: The 'deep' topics you can discuss with an artificial intelligence.

This is the ability to distinguish geometric and regular shapes without any prior training. This ability is not only present in humans, but crows could also distinguish them.

According to research conducted by the University of Tübingen in Germany, published in the journal Science, crows were also shown to possess this ability. See more: The risks of sharing personal data to generate anime versions with AI

" Crows were trained to detect a visually distinctive intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were immediately able to apply this intruder concept to quadrilaterals , identifying the one that exhibited geometric properties distinct from the others in the set ," the study notes in part.

Thus, the crows, according to the research, " exhibited a geometric regularity effect, showing better performance with shapes that featured right angles, parallel lines, or symmetry than with more irregular shapes. This performance advantage did not require learning. Our findings suggest that geometric intuitions are not specific to humans, but are deeply rooted in biological evolution ."

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The research team focused their analysis on carrion crows (Corvus corone corone), which are well known for their intelligence and cognitive abilities, such as solving complex problems and using tools.

The first crow in the study correctly identified the shape in 48.3% of trials, while a second crow did so in 56.7% of cases.

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In this way, they demonstrated that not only humans can distinguish geometric shapes, but crows can too.

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