The more researchers study pigeons, the more it is revealed how the birds' brains operate very much like humans.
According to a study carried out by a team from the University of Iowa, pigeons are able to name and categorize both man-made and natural objects and can do so simultaneously. Ed Wasserman, a UI psychology professor and corresponding author for the study, said that their research hints at a similarity between how the birds associate words and how children do it.
Various research teams have been studying intelligence in animals for decades and the results of this recent work further proves that animals are smarter than what was previously assumed and have a lot more to teach researchers.
The research Wasserman and colleagues carried out is based off a project featured in The New York Times and published in 1988 where researchers from U as well discovered pigeons are capable of distinguishing four categories of objects.
For the current study, researchers created a computerized version of the "name game." Three pigeons were then shown 128 photos of objects in black and white. The objects were from 16 categories: tree, shoe, plan, phone, pen, key, hat, flower, fish, duck, dog, cracker, car, cake, bottle and baby. The birds were to choose under which category an object belonged to by pecking on one of two symbols. Not only did the pigeons successfully learn the task before them, they were also able to learn four new photos for every category.
The researchers add that their take on the experiment translates to a purely associative animal model, the first to capture a crucial factor in learning words: the mapping process involving stimuli and responses.
"Ours is a computerized task that can be provided to any animal, it doesn't have to be pigeons. These methods can be used with any type of animal that can interact with a computer screen," explained Bob McMurray, one of the co-authors for the study.
He added that the manner by which children are able to learn words might not exactly be unique to people, after all.
Compared to the average bird, pigeons are considered smarter. Not only do they have a homing instinct that allows them to find their way back home hundreds of miles away (even when blindfolded!) but they also have better eyesight than people. They have been trained in the past to carry messages for the U.S. Army during the World Wars and to spot orange life jackets for search and rescue missions out at sea.
The study was published in the journal Cognition.
