Crows have brains ‘in the fast lane’
The birds accurately complete decision-making tasks twice as fast as primates, although their endbrains look considerably different.
Crows display remarkable cognitive abilities, outperforming primates in perceptual decision-making tasks, according to a new study published in Science. Despite their distinct neural structures, these birds execute such tasks twice as swiftly as primates, including humans. Lead investigator Andreas Nieder, an animal physiology professor at the University of Tübingen, explains that crows, belonging to the corvid family, diverged from a common ancestor with mammals over 300 million years ago.
Instead of possessing a mammalian layered neocortex, crows have a nuclear pallium. Nieder and his colleagues investigated the crows' capacity for visual-based decision-making, not broader choices like economic ones. Marc Schmidt, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed astonishment upon learning of the crows' swift performance, emphasizing the comparative approach's potential for surprising discoveries.
Two crows, named Iggy and Lemmy, were trained to complete a standard perceptual decision-making task involving moving dots on a screen. Remarkably, the crows correctly identified the direction of the coalesced dots in an average of 235 milliseconds, twice as fast as primates, while maintaining a 74% accuracy rate. The study's lead investigator, Nieder, suggests further exploration into complex decision-making models, the crows' confidence in their choices, and potential explanations for their rapid neural processing, such as smaller brain size, shorter neuronal connections, and higher body temperature.
Experts remain curious about whether this exceptional speed is an avian-specific trait or a characteristic unique to crows.
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