Original Scientific Article Summary

3. Summary of the Original Scientific Article: The scientific article discussed how crows assess unsavory environments. Such the case being studied is when there is a dead conspecifics (another crow) or heterospecific (hawk). They tested the response by measuring the time period after the removal of the stimuli that the crows approached the food source. There were three experiments used in order to determine the validity of their hypothesis that conspecific death would lead birds to change their behavior. The first experiment looked at the behavioral response, as to the mobbing behavior of crows, more broadly testing the response crows have to conspecific death. The second experiment examined the salience of responses, comparing the type of

While I think that the conclusions that are dawn are fairly strong, especially in noting that the crows are basing danger of a situation with the dead body of another crow or hawk. I think that the conclusion potentially lacks, because of the learning aspect. The article claims, that the crows are learning to associate a person with danger. By learning and remembering a mask, they are able to distinguish predators. However, I think that they did not provide enough evidence that they are not learning to learning to associate an area with danger instead. Perhaps, the crows are learning that an area is dangerous and thereby noting an individual who is present. Remembering of past experiences of dangerous areas, they could be making predictions based off being in similar circumstances. The person could thereby not be a predator, but rather a signal. The assumptions in experiments one and two are that the set-up of the experiment did not bias the crows that were already present at the site. The assumption for experiment 3 that there is no difference in using a fresh carcass and a stuffed taxidermied pigeon. I would like to have more information about the reaction of the birds that were already at the site and saw the set up in comparison to that of birds who did not see the experimenter before. I would also like to see

However I would say that, their use of predominantly the highlighted section within the scientific article led them astray, in that they were unable to provide concise information about key aspects of the study in my opinion. One of such things was the lack of information about the process with the masks. Although they did mention the masks in the popular article, whereby they stated that volunteers wore masks and that in other studies, they had shown that crows remember the faces of individuals for nine years, they failed to mention the exact findings of the study in regard to retention time to the predatory avoidance of individuals wearing such masks. Yet another portion which I think that the popular article missed was that there were two different scenarios placed on the birds after the presentation of the stimuli. In trial A, the individual wearing the mask carrying the dead bird left the food source. In contrast, situation B had the masked individual return after the stimulus of the dead bird’s removal and remained at the pile of food for a set period of time. Distinguishing the two different post-exposure situations allows justification, which the popular article only states end findings