GoKawiilCrows match primate decision-making speed—at double the pace—study finds
Neurobiologists Andreas Nieder and Philipp Schmidbauer trained two carrion crows on a random-dot-motion task originally designed for monkeys, recording neural activity as the birds pecked targets to indicate which direction a cloud of dots was moving. The crows used the same evidence-accumulation strategy seen in primates despite lacking a neocortex, and reached decisions roughly twice as fast.
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The findings suggest that accumulating sensory evidence to a decision threshold may be a general computational strategy that different brain architectures can independently arrive at, rather than something unique to the mammalian neocortex. Nieder frames the crows' structurally distinct brains as a natural test case for how decision-making can be implemented differently yet follow the same underlying math, which could reshape comparative views of intelligence across species.
- Crows performed a random-dot-motion task originally used to study monkey brain decision-making.
- Despite having no neocortex, crows followed the same evidence-accumulation logic as primates.
- The crows reached decisions about twice as fast as monkeys in equivalent tasks.
Source: arstechnica.com, 2026-10-23
Published there as: “Crows can evaluate visual info twice as fast as mammals”
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