Study
Ravens, Corvus corax, differentiate between knowledgeable and ignorant competitors
Bugnyar, Thomas; Heinrich, Bernd
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2005
Ravens cached food while a competitor either watched or was unable to see. The cacher was later allowed to retrieve its stores in the presence of a competitor that had either witnessed the caching or had not.
- Studied in
- Corvus corax
- Sample size
- hand-raised ravens tested in caching trials
Ravens retrieved and re-hid caches sooner when the competitor present had witnessed the original caching, and behaved differently towards knowledgeable and ignorant birds.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Ravens track what a specific competitor has been in a position to see, and adjust their behaviour accordingly.
How NatureHQ reads it
The interesting part is what has to be excluded. A raven could produce this pattern by responding to the competitor’s current behaviour rather than by tracking what it saw earlier, and separating those two accounts has occupied the field for two decades. This study is one of the better attempts, and the question of whether corvids represent another animal’s knowledge — rather than reacting to reliable cues — remains genuinely open.
- Hand-raised captive birds with extensive experience of these experimental settings.
- Behaviour-reading and mind-reading accounts are difficult to separate definitively.
- Small samples, as is usual in corvid cognition work.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.
doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2005.3144
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.