Crows face a special switching cost when they have to start vocalizing

Moving from another task into a vocal response slowed crows and sometimes led to errors, while pecking was largely unaffected.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

Researchers presented carrion crows with arbitrary visual cues and asked them to produce either a vocalization or a peck. The cues appeared in randomized, alternating or blocked sequences, allowing the researchers to vary how often the crows switched between the two kinds of response.

The crows performed both actions with high accuracy, but vocalizations took longer and varied more in speed. Switching into a vocal response produced a clear delay and occasional errors, whereas switching into pecking had little effect on performance.

When crows switched responses

The crows could flexibly switch between vocal and pecking responses based on visual cues. Vocalizations were consistently slower and more variable than pecking. When a vocal response followed a different type of response, the crows showed a switching cost: their reaction times increased and they sometimes made errors. Pecking was largely unaffected by these transitions.

Why vocal control matters

The findings indicate that intentional vocal responses place specific demands on cognitive control in crows. They show that crows can coordinate speed, accuracy and flexible switching when choosing actions, and identify a vocal-control cost that has not previously been described in birds. This places crows among the rare non-primate animals known to combine these features during deliberate vocal behavior.

Evidence and limits

This was a controlled behavioral experiment in trained carrion crows. The researchers compared performance across response sequences designed to change how often the birds switched between vocalizations and pecking. The abstract does not report the number of crows, effect sizes or the duration of training, so it is not possible to assess those details here. The results provide behavioral evidence for extra control demands during vocal responses, but the study as described does not directly identify the underlying brain mechanisms or show how broadly the findings apply to other birds or natural situations.

// Source

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2026 · DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2026.1105

View paper (DOI)Open access versionPublished 2026-10-14

Authors: Diana A. Liao, Felix Kürble, Andreas Nieder

Institutions: University of Tübingen

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