[zaidhaan]

> Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained two crows to peck pairs of brackets in a center-embedded recursive sequence.

> Two of the three monkeys in the experiment generated recursive sequences more often than nonrecursive sequences ...

I'm no academic but aren't those extremely small sample sizes to make any reasonable deductions from? This looks to be even addressed in one of the papers cited...

> While a sample size of two is not enough to infer that any crow in the population may generate center-embedded recursive sequences, we present a "proof of existence" showing that this cognitive capacity is, in principle, within the reach of carrion crows.[0]

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356

[zaidhaan]

Not sure why I got downvoted. If my assumption is wrong then I'd be really curious to hear from someone that knows better.

[goto11]

It is unclear what your complaint is. As the second quote states, you only need a sample size of one to prove that a certain ability can exist. You just cant say much about how widespread the ability is.

[zaidhaan]

Thanks for the clarification. That seems fair, I suppose the title of the article gave me the impression that they were claiming such an ability would be widespread in all crows (despite the study being done on two carrion crows), when in fact it seems the intention was to state that the ability can exist in any crow given that they proved it exists for those two specific crows.