First off, writing this blog from my winter home in Florida, I appreciate the sensibility of snowbirds who abandon their northern climes every fall. Smart! Furthermore, studies show that avian brains, specifically crows and ravens (collectively known as “corvids”), can accommodate statistical thinking—a skill that many humans lack based on my experience as an educator. Researchers from the University of Tübingen worked this out via a clever experiment that required crows to assess the probability of getting a treat based on prior experience pecking at differing images.
“True statistical inference requires subjects use relative rather than absolute frequency of previously experienced events. Here, we show that crows can relate memorized reward probabilities to infer reward-maximizing decisions.”
Johnston, et al, Crows flexibly apply statistical inferences based on previous experience, Current Biology, Volume 33, Issue 15, 7 August 2023, Pages 3238-3243
This gives new meaning to the saying that “if the p-value is high, the null must fly.”