Corvids create novel causal interventions after all
Résumé
Using a novel paradigm, Tayloret al.[1] recently investigated whether NewCaledonian crows make causal interventions in comparison to 24-month-oldchildren. They view a causal intervention as the ability, after having onlyobserved a correlation between cause and effect, to produce a novel behaviouralpattern to recreate the same outcome. They conclude that New Caledoniancrows cannot make causal interventions, whereas most children can. Theyalso question whether any previous work has provided evidence for causalinterventions in corvids. We argue that their conclusions are prematurebecause of both methodological and theoretical limitations to their study, andbecause their analysis of previous work is ambiguous.