Decision-making flexibility in New Caledonian crows, young children and adult humans in a multi-dimensional tool-use task

We present the first study on flexible decision-making in an inhibitory control tool-use task in 3-5-year-old children, adult humans and tool-making New Caledonian crows, using a paradigm previously used to test non-tool making Goffin's cockatoos. Tasks varied in relational complexity, manipulating reward quality and tool functionality. Suprisingly, adult humans and corvids performed better than children in selecting an immediate reward when a tool was not necessary. In addition, comparisons of our results with those previously published on parrots show that adult humans and cockatoos performed better than crows and children in selecting an immediate reward over a non-functional tool. By contrast, human adults and children outperformed the birds when all task components were present, suggesting that both the cockatoos and corvids struggled to attend to multiple variables without extended experience.