Crows reason well because they have a good working memory.

Working memory, as an aid to reasoning, has been studied with respect to crows.

According to scientist, David Crow, the concept of “working memory” is more useful than the concept of “short term memory” which is an older term in the study of memory. Crow has posted a tutorial online which discusses the utility of the working memory terminology:

The main consideration for the move from the Short Term Memory (STM) Model to Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory was that in order for information to become part of long term memory (LTM) in the short term memory model this information must be rehearsed in the STM before it could become part of LTM.

Craik and Lockhart (1972, in Anderson, 1995) argued that it was not how long a piece of information was rehearsed in memory as proposed by Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968, in Anderson, 1995) but rather the depth to which it was processed. This theory, held that rehearsal improved memory only if the material was rehearsed in some meaningful way.

Experiments have shown that the passive rehearsal of information results in little improvement in memory performance. Glenberg, Smith, & Green (1977, in Anderson, 1995) has subjects study a four-digit number and then rehearse a word for 2, 6, or 18 seconds.

The participants thought that the task was to recall the number and the words were used to fill time, when in fact it was the words that the experimenters were interested in. The participants were asked to recall the words they had rehearsed, not the numbers and the participants recalled only 11, 7 and 13 percent of the words for the 2, 6, and 18 second conditions respectively.

This experiment provides support for the Baddeley model of working memory in which there is no time requirement for information to become integrated into LTM. Therefore it appears that there is no short-term halfway station on the route to LTM but rather it is the way the information is processed that is critical for setting up the LTM trace.

Baddeley’s proposed model of working memory also addressed the issue of memory span. In the Atkinson & Shiffrin short-term model of memory, it was proposed that there was a limit on the number of items that short-term memory could hold called the memory span. In terms of short term memory this number was thought to be approximately 7 +/- 2 (Miller’s Magic Number) (Broadbent, 1975, in Anderson, 1995; Miller, 1956). Baddeley proposed what limited the length memory is the speed at which we can rehearse information.

Read the rest of this study guide here.

Click next page to read a summary of a study by by Viet, Hartman, and Nieder, at the University of Tübingen, Germany, with the goal of verifying a crow’s capacity for strategic thinking, using the identified working memory.