Subjective experiences that can be consciously accessed and reported are associated with the cerebral cortex. Whether sensory consciousness can also arise from differently organized brains that lack a layered cerebral cortex, such as the bird brain, remains unknown. We show that single-neuron responses in the pallial endbrain of crows performing a visual detection task correlate with the birds’ perception about stimulus presence or absence and argue that this is an empirical marker of avian consciousness. Neuronal activity follows a temporal two-stage process in which the first activity component mainly reflects physical stimulus intensity, whereas the later component predicts the crows’ perceptual reports. These results suggest that the neural foundations that allow sensory consciousness arose either before the emergence of mammals or independently in at least the avian lineage and do not necessarily require a cerebral cortex.

Endowed with an elaborate cerebral cortex, humans and other primates can assess the number of items in a set, or numerosity, from birth on [1] and without being trained [2]. Whether spontaneous numerosity extraction is a unique feat of the mammalian cerebral cortex [3-7] or rather an adaptive property that can be found in differently designed and independently evolved neural substrates, such as the avian enbrain [8], is unknown. To address this question, we recorded single-cell activity from the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), a high-level avian association brain area [9-11], of numerically naive crows. We found that a proportion of NCL neurons were spontaneously responsive to numerosity and tuned to the number of items, even though the crows were never trained to assess numerical quantity. Our data show that numerosity-selective neuronal responses are spontaneously present in the distinct endbrains of diverge vertebrate taxa. This seemingly hard-wired property of the avian endbrain to extract numerical quantity explains how birds in the wild, or right after hatching, can exploit numerical cues when making foraging or social decisions. It suggests that endbrain circuitries that evolved based on convergent evolution, such as the avian endbrain, give rise to the same numerosity code.

Humans show impaired recognition of faces that are presented upside down, a phenomenon termed face inversion effect, which is thought to reflect the special relevance of faces for humans. Here, we investigated whether a phylogenetically distantly related avian species, the carrion crow, with similar socio-cognitive abilities to human and non-human primates, exhibits a face inversion effect. In a delayed matching-to-sample task, two crows had to differentiate profiles of crow faces as well as matched controls, presented both upright and inverted. Because crows can discriminate humans based on their faces, we also assessed the face inversion effect using human faces. Both crows performed better with crow faces than with human faces and performed worse when responding to inverted pictures in general compared to upright pictures. However, neither of the crows showed a face inversion effect. For comparative reasons, the tests were repeated with human subjects. As expected, humans showed a face-specific inversion effect. Therefore, we did not find any evidence that crows—like humans—process faces as a special visual stimulus. Instead, individual recognition in crows may be based on cues other than a conspecific’s facial profile, such as their body, or on processing of local features rather than holistic processing.

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The ability to group sensory data into behaviorally meaningful classes and to maintain these perceptual categories active in working memory is key to intelligent behavior. Here, we show that carrion crows, highly vocal and cognitively advanced corvid songbirds, possess categorical auditory working memory. The crows were trained in a delayed match-to-category task that required them to flexibly match remembered sounds based on the upward or downward shift of the sounds' frequency modulation. After training, the crows instantaneously classified novel sounds into the correct auditory categories. The crows showed sharp category boundaries as a function of the relative frequency interval of the modulation. In addition, the crows generalized frequency-modulated sounds within a category and correctly classified novel sounds kept in working memory irrespective of other acoustic features of the sound. This suggests that crows can form and actively memorize auditory perceptual categories in the service of cognitive control of their goal-directed behaviors.