Cognizione Temporale, Spaziale e Numerica nel Cervello del Corvo - Temporal, Spatial, and Numerical Cognition in the Crow Brain

We have moved beyond the era when the term “bird brain” was coined in the 1920s to refer to a stupid person. As shown by the pioneering work of Nieder, crows display remarkable cognitive abilities when tested on tasks requiring e.g. working memory (WM), behavioral inhibition, and behavioral flexibility (Nieder et al. 2021). Such cognitive functions primarily originate from the associative avian pallium, which evolved independently of the mammalian cerebral cortex.Within the pallium, the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) serves as a high-level association area that has developed features functionally comparable to the primate prefrontal cortex. For this, it provides a fascinating animal model for understanding how convergent evolution can lead to similar cognitive abilities across species. Nieder has conducted research on both macaques and crows, investigating numbers and length. Genovesio, on the other hand, has worked on macaques, studying the neural representation of durations and spatial distances. This funding would provide a valuable opportunity to combine our closely related yet complementary expertise leveraging the uniquely equipped crow facility in Germany, an asset not available in Italy or any other country. The range of proposed experiments allows us to investigate how timing is computed in the crow brain from the initial representation of stimulus duration and its maintenance in WM to its comparison with other durations, as well as its relationship to the processing of number and space. We will also study timing across visual and auditory modalities. Beyond perceptual timing, we aim to uncover the underlying mechanisms that support higher-level cognitive functions, including decision-making, goal representation, and goalaction transformation. A central question shared by both laboratories is how diverse magnitude domains, studied with different approaches by us, are processed separately yet converge to some abstract magnitude representation