Social cognition in ravens: from ‘who does what’ to ‘who knows what’?

Dealing with a complex social world requires sophisticated knowledge about others, allowing individuals to predict, and manipulate, the behaviour of potential competitors as well as cooperation partners. However, the ability of judging others’ responses may be qualitatively different from a human-like understanding that the others’ behaviour is guided by mental states such as perceptions, intentions and beliefs (‘Theory of Mind’).

I here present a series of experiments on socio-cognitive abilities in ravens Corvus corax that have been suggested to be linked with mental state attribution in humans. Starting with a case study on one bird who repeatedly led a conspecific competitor away from food, I will explain the tactics of birds who store food and those who attempt pilfering the caches when they were experimentally confronted with competitors that were knowledgeable or ignorant about the location of these caches. Finally, I will show that the ravens’ ability to judge the other’s perspective is not restricted to food caching but can be used to track the gaze of human experimenters around a visual barrier. These findings suggest that ravens may understand something about the others’ perception and support the view that complex socio-cognitive skills such as precursors to a human-like ‘Theory of Mind’ have evolved multiple times.