Corvids create novel causal interventions after all

Abstract

First paragraph: Using a novel paradigm, Taylor et al. recently investigated whether New Caledonian crows make causal interventions in comparison to 24-month-old children. They view a causal intervention as the ability, after having only observed a correlation between cause and effect, to produce a novel behavioural pattern to recreate the same outcome. They conclude that New Caledonian crows cannot make causal interventions, whereas most children can. They also question whether any previous work has provided evidence for causal interventions in corvids. We argue that their conclusions are premature because of both methodological and theoretical limitations to their study, and because their analysis of previous work is ambiguous.