In a study published Thursday (Oct. 22) in the journal Science, researchers found that two carrion crows (Corvus corone) could distinguish the direction of moving dots on a screen in an average of 235 milliseconds, or less than a quarter of a second. By contrast, historical studies of humans suggest they make decisions in similar tasks six seconds as fast.
Given birds and mammals have evolved along separate paths for more than 310 million years, "this suggests that evolution may have independently developed similar solutions to the same computational problem," study co-author Andreas Neider, a professor of animal physiology and director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
By changing the proportion of dots moving together, the researchers could make the decision easier or harder for the crow. When most dots moved in the same direction, the answer was fairly obvious for the birds. But when only a small percentage moved together, the birds had weaker visual evidence to base their decisions on.
One of the carrion crows used in the study completes a decision-making task. (Image credit: Andreas Neider)The birds maintained high accuracy in different rounds of the experiment, suggesting they were not sacrificing judgement for quickness.
What happens inside the crow brain?
To understand how the birds reached their decisions so quickly, the researchers recorded activity from 248 neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) — a region of the bird brain that's considered functionally comparable to the prefrontal cortex in humans and primates. Birds lack the layered cerebral cortex found in mammalian brains, but the NCL performs similarly advanced functions.
"The bigger implication is that a brain does not need a mammalian neocortex to perform sophisticated computations," Neider said.
The speediness of the crows' decision-making may reflect the demands of the birds' daily lives.
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For Neider, observing the faster decision-making process in crows raises a broader question about how scientists define intelligence.
Are you a bird nerd? Find out with our bird quiz!
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