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

Researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany have demonstrated that crows can make visual decisions twice as fast as humans and primates. In a study conducted by Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder at the Institute of Neurobiology, crows were tasked with identifying the direction of a moving dot pattern on a touchscreen.

On average, the birds took only 235 milliseconds to identify the movement direction and indicate their choice with their beak. The study noted that even when movement patterns were difficult to recognize, the crows' decisions were better than chance, reaching nearly 100% accuracy when signals were clear.

To investigate this capability, scientists recorded neuronal activity in the nidopallium caudolaterale, an associative brain region in birds comparable to the human prefrontal cortex. Neural signals corresponding to different movement directions began to activate just 70 milliseconds after the visual stimulus appeared, well before the birds emitted a physical response.