Experience affects novel object aversion and the use of human cues in rural and urban American crows

Working with American crows, we tested for differences in two behaviors strongly affected by experience with people. We show that urban crows are less likely than rural individuals to feed near a novel object (i.e., neophobia), while crows in both environments avoid objects that they are less familiar with.

In a separate experiment, we show that only urban crows use the direction of an approaching person’s gaze when making escape decisions (i.e., flight initiation distance).</p>