What's it like being a raven or a crow?

Many of us as children may have wondered what's going on inside the mind of an animal-what are they thinking and feeling? Most animal researchers study science because of their fascination with animals, but for a long time scientific norms made it impossible to even raise the question of animal consciousness without losing scientific credibility.

Fortunately, those days have ended, thanks in large part to pioneering work by scientists such as Donald Griffin, who argued from the 1980s to his death in 2003 that animal minds should be a topic for scientific study.

We are philosophers who study consciousness, and in our recent research we worked with other scientists to explore what the world might be like from the point of view of corvids, the family of birds that includes ravens, crows, jays and magpies.

"Birdbrain" used to be a common insult but corvids have such surprising intelligence that they are sometimes described by scientists and journalists as "feathered apes". But we wanted to go beyond intelligence. To do this we examined five dimensions of their experience by combing through studies on their behavior, cognition, brains, emotions and consciousness.

Corvids' eyes have incredibly sharp resolution that allows them to navigate while flying at high speeds and to find potential sources of food. Their hearing is excellent allowing them to even distinguish reliable from unreliable group members by assessing and remembering their alert calls.

They also have a good sense of smell, which they use to help them find nuts and other food they have hidden.

Corvids show cognitive biases, similar to humans. They have negative moods and show signs of pessimism after observing similar states in others. But they also show positive moods after successfully using tools-just like humans.

Read the full article on The Conversation. Republished under a Creative Commons license.