Crows can make visual decisions twice as fast as humans, finds study

The study was published in Science by researchers at the Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen in Germany.

The study was published in Science by researchers at the Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen in Germany | Representative Image

New Delhi: Crows can make visual decisions in half the time humans take, and that too without sacrificing any of the accuracy, found a new study published in Science.

The study was published by Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder, researchers at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They trained two carrion crows (Corvus corone) to detect the direction in which a group of moving dots was travelling on a touchscreen. The birds took an average of just 235 milliseconds to make their decision, nearly twice as fast as humans and monkeys take for similar tests.

The findings suggest that birds might have a way to process visual information extremely quickly despite having brains that are organised in a very different manner compared to mammals.

During the experiment, the crows were made to watch the patterns of dots as they moved towards the left or the right. Researchers had taught them to peck at a target on the corresponding side of the screen. If they got the answer right, they were rewarded with mealworms.

To make the task harder, researchers even varied the number of dots moving in the same directions. Some patterns were easier to interpret while others were not. Even when only three per cent of the dots were moving together, the birds were still quite successful.

What happens in the brain?

To understand what was happening inside the bird’s brain, researchers recorded the activity of 248 neurons in a brain region called the nidopallium caudolaterale. This is the part of the brain that plays a major role in complex thinking.

According to the study’s findings, hardly 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared on the screen, the bird’s decision making process was already visible in the neural activity.

Although birds do not have the same layered brain structure, also called the neocortex, their brains use similar brain processes to make sense of information and reach a decision. Researchers suggest that this ‘quick thinking’ might have developed over the course of their evolution due to their need to react quickly while flying and navigating obstacles in the air.

However, the findings are based only on experiments using two crows and more research is needed to establish whether all crows and bird species have similar abilities.