Costs and benefits of voluntary attention in crows.

Behavioural signatures of voluntary, endogenous selective attention have been found in both mammals and birds, but the relationship between performance benefits at attended and costs at unattended locations remains unclear. We trained two carrion crows () on a Posner-like spatial cueing task with dissociated cue and target locations, using both highly predictive and neutral central cues to compare reaction time (RT) and detection accuracy for validly, invalidly and neutrally cued targets. We found robust RT effects of predictive cueing at varying stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA) that resulted from both advantages at cued locations and costs at un-cued locations.

Exogenous and endogenous spatial attention in crows.

Attention describes the ability to selectively process a particular aspect of the environment at the expense of others. Despite the significance of selective processing, the types and scopes of attentional mechanisms in nonprimate species remain underexplored. We trained four carrion crows in Posner spatial cueing tasks using two separate protocols where the attention-capturing cues are shown at different times before target onset at either the same or a different location as the impending target.