Crows can make visual decisions twice as quickly as humans and monkeys, according to new research from the University of Tübingen. In experiments involving two carrion crows, the birds needed an average of just 235 milliseconds to determine which way a pattern of moving dots was traveling and respond with their choice. Despite their remarkable speed, they remained highly accurate.
The findings, published in the journal Science, offer new insight into how bird brains process information and make decisions. Researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Professor Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen's Institute of Neurobiology found that the crows' rapid responses were accompanied by equally impressive activity in their brain cells.
To test the birds' decision-making abilities, the researchers presented them with moving dots on a touchscreen. The crows had to determine whether most of the dots were traveling left or right, then indicate their answer by pecking a target on the corresponding side of the screen.
The birds performed remarkably well, even when the direction of movement was difficult to identify. "Even when the patterns of motion were hard to recognize, the crows' decisions were still better than random choices," Philipp Schmidbauer reports, "and with clear signals, they achieved an accuracy of nearly 100 percent."
Source: ScienceDaily - Psychology — Read the full article on the original site ↗