When you think about intelligent animals, how long would it take you to think about pigeons?
Elephants, dolphins, or chimpanzees would come to your mind, but pigeons?
We have known these little thick-necked birds for so long. They can remember faces, they can see the world in vivid colors, they can navigate through complex routes, deliver news, and even save lives. Recently, scientists have found that pigeons can do simple math, too.
Let us explore this less talked about side of pigeons in this article.
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Understanding the intelligence of pigeons
Forget everything you think you know about pigeons. You can not dismiss them as just any pesky birds that poop on your car. They are way smarter than we think, and scientists have recently done a study to prove this. This new study showed that pigeons can solve problems in the same way artificial intelligence works.
Pigeons solving problems
The scientists took in 24 pigeons and gave them a kind of test. They showed them pictures like lines and circles, and the pigeons had to peck a button to say if the picture belonged to a certain group. If they got it right, they got a tasty reward. But if they got it wrong, they got nothing.
The pigeons learned to sort the images faster by pecking the right button over and over. For some of the easier pictures, they went from getting it right only half the time to almost always getting it right. They improved the right choices from 55% to 95% for those simple tasks. Even for trickier pictures, they improved a lot. A lot means their accuracy went up from 55% to 68% for more complex challenges.
The Pigeon as a machine study shows that pigeons are smarter than we thought. They can learn from their mistakes and figure things out, just like AI.
Pigeons can do math?
Many animals, from bees to elephants, can tell the difference between small and big amounts of things. But scientists thought only primates, like monkeys and apes, could truly understand numbers. For example, scientists showed rhesus monkeys that they could understand order. If you showed them two pictures, one with one dot and another with three dots, they knew the picture with one dot came first. This kind of understanding had only been seen in primates before.
Experiment
Damian Scarf, a comparative psychologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and lead author of the new pigeon study, wanted to see if other animals could do this, too. So, he trained pigeons. He showed them pictures with different numbers of things on them, like one yellow rectangle, two red ovals, or three yellow bars. The pigeons had to peck at the pictures in order from least to most stuff (one dot, then two dots, then three dots) to get a treat. This way, Scarf knew the pigeons were not just picking based on color or shape, but they actually understood the number of things they saw.
Real test
The next step was to see if the pigeons truly understood the concept of order, not just the training they received. So, the researchers showed them pictures with even more shapes, anywhere from one to nine. Even though they were only trained on recognizing “first,” “second,” and “third,” the pigeons could still figure out the order for these new pictures, like five ovals or seven rectangles. They got the answers right away more often than just guessing!
Unexpected results
The pigeons did even better than expected. They could sort pictures with even more shapes, like six and nine, in the right order. How far smart pigeons could be? Elizabeth Brannon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the lead author on the original rhesus monkey study, even said they should be more impressed by the pigeons than the monkeys. She thinks pigeons and monkeys might be using the same part of their brain to solve this problem, even though their brains are very different and evolved over millions of years. This means other animals might be able to do the same thing if we just test them.
Will animals do advanced math one day?
Other researchers agree on this. They think many animals can probably understand amounts and use them somehow. Michael Beran, a comparative psychologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, thinks that this Pigeons on Par with Primates research could mean that some animals might even have the brainpower to be as good at math as humans. Maybe someday we will even discover animals that can do advanced math.
What does this mean for science?
This experiment surprised the researchers. They figured there were two possibilities. Maybe both pigeons and monkeys learned this skill separately, even though their ancestors lived way back before dinosaurs (around 300 million years ago). Or this ability to understand numbers was already present in their last common ancestor.
Either way, understanding numbers is a helpful skill for animals. For example, let us say a monkey can see two piles of fruit: one with 5 pieces and another with 6. If the monkey can figure out that 6 is more than 5, it can choose the bigger pile to eat. Maybe this evolutionary benefit to understanding numbers is the reason we humans can do math so well today, too.
Conclusion
Who imagined the birds you see hanging around parks and pooping on your car can actually do simple math? These research results are surprising because we never thought the pigeons were that smart. Not only simple math, but pigeons can also learn from consequences and can correct their errors, like AI models. Pigeon’s secret ability leaves us in question. What other animals besides monkeys and apes are secretly good at things we did not know about?