The exceptional cognitive abilities of crows could be partly due to a structure in their brain that can temporarily retain visual information.
To see whether crows have aspects of working memory — the ability to remember information for future tasks — Andreas Nieder and his team at the University of Tübingen, Germany, trained four carrion crows (Corvus corone, pictured) in a task that required them to recall images 1 second after first seeing them. During this task, the team recorded the activity of 662 individual neurons in a region of the brain called the nidopallium caudolaterale, which is thought to correspond to the mammalian prefrontal cortex — an area involved in higher-order thought.
The neurons seem to encode and maintain information about the image during this time delay, suggesting that this brain area is involved in the visual component of working memory.
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Crow brain recalls images. Nature 510, 191 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/510191e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/510191e
