Neurobiologists in Germany have found that carrion crows process visual information and make accurate decisions in just 235 milliseconds — twice as fast as humans and monkeys, infohub.kz reports.
The conclusion comes from researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Professor Andreas Nieder of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, who published their findings in the journal Science. In the experiments, the birds needed an average of just 235 milliseconds to determine the direction of motion of objects on a screen and respond to them with high accuracy, the science portal ScienceDaily writes.
During the trials, two carrion crows were shown a cluster of moving dots on a touchscreen. The birds had to work out which way — left or right — most of the dots were moving and peck a target on the corresponding side of the display. According to Philipp Schmidbauer, even when the trajectories were hard to distinguish, the crows performed better than chance, and with clear signals their accuracy approached 100 percent.
Recording the activity of individual neurons in the caudolateral nidopallium — a brain region in birds that performs functions similar to those of the human prefrontal cortex — showed that discrimination of direction began just 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared. According to Andreas Nieder, despite birds lacking a layered cerebral cortex, their brains use the same fundamental principles of evidence accumulation for decision-making as the brains of primates, and their record speed evolved for precise maneuvers in flight and for working with their beaks.