Preprocessed behavioral data from: Volitional spatial attention is lateralized in crows

Like humans and many other animal species, birds exhibit left-right
asymmetries in certain behaviors due to differences in hemispheric brain
functions. While the lateralization of sensory and motor functions is well
established in birds, the potential lateralization of high-level executive
control functions, such as volitional attention, remains unknown. Here, we
demonstrate that carrion crows exhibit more pronounced volitional
(endogenous) attention for stimuli monocularly viewed with the left eye
and thus in the left visual hemifield. We trained four crows on
Posner-like spatial cueing tasks using informative cues to evaluate their
volitional top-down attention. The crows detected cued targets using
either the left or right eye. As a measure of volitional attention, we
calculated reaction time differences for detecting targets that were
correctly (validly) and incorrectly (invalidly) cued, separately for the
left and right visual hemifields. We found that cued targets were detected
more quickly and efficiently in the left visual field compared to the
right visual field. Because the right hemisphere of the crow's brain
processes information primarily from the left visual hemifield, these
findings suggest that crows, like humans, exhibit superior executive
control of attention in the right hemisphere of their brains.