The common pigeon, a permanent resident of all cities across the world, is smarter than we think although its brain is no bigger than the tip of your index finger.
A new study by researchers from the University of Iowa found that pigeons can categorize and name both natural and manmade objects. And, not just a few. These birds categorized 128 photographs into 16 categories, and they did so simultaneously.
Ed Wasserman, UI professor of psychology and corresponding author of the study, says the finding suggests a similarity between how pigeons learn the equivalent of words and the way children do.
"Unlike prior attempts to teach words to primates, dogs, and parrots, we used neither elaborate shaping methods nor social cues," Wasserman says of the study, published online in the journal Cognition. "And our pigeons were trained on all 16 categories simultaneously, a much closer analog of how children learn words and categories."
For researchers like Wasserman, who has been studying animal intelligence for decades, this latest experiment is further proof that animals-whether primates, birds, or dogs-are smarter than once presumed and have more to teach scientists.
The researchers used a computerized version of the "name game" in which three pigeons were shown 128 black-and-white photos of objects from 16 basic categories: baby, bottle, cake, car, cracker, dog, duck, fish, flower, hat, key, pen, phone, plan, shoe, tree. They then had to peck on one of two different symbols: the correct one for that photo and an incorrect one that was randomly chosen from one of the remaining 15 categories. When they pecked on the right photo, food pellets were given to them. The pigeons not only succeeded in learning the task, but they reliably transferred the learning to four new photos from each of the 16 categories.
Pigeons have long been known to be smarter than your average bird-or many other animals, for that matter. Among their many talents, pigeons have a "homing instinct" that helps them find their way home from hundreds of miles away, even when blindfolded. They have better eyesight than humans and have been trained by the U. S. Coast Guard to spot orange life jackets of people lost at sea.
UI psychologist Bob McMurray says the research shows the mechanisms by which children learn words might not be unique to humans.
"Children are confronted with an immense task of learning thousands of words without a lot of background knowledge to go on," he says. "For a long time, people thought that such learning is special to humans. What this research shows is that the mechanisms by which children solve this huge problem may be mechanisms that are shared with many species."
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