University of Tübingen researchers find crows make decisions twice as fast as humans

Researchers at the University of Tübingen have discovered that crows can make visual decisions approximately twice as fast as humans and primates. In a study published in the journal Science, scientists Philipp Schmidbauer and Professor Andreas Nieder observed two carrion crows performing a task where they had to identify the predominant direction of moving dots on a screen.

The crows reached decisions in an average of just 235 milliseconds, maintaining nearly 100 percent accuracy when patterns were clear. By recording the activity of individual neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale—a brain region functioning similarly to the human prefrontal cortex—the team found that crows utilize fundamental decision-making mechanisms similar to those found in mammals, despite having vastly different brain structures.

Researchers suggest this exceptional speed may be an evolutionary adaptation to the high-speed requirements of flight and the need to precisely grab food with their beaks.