Crows Make Faster Visual Decisions Than Humans

Have you ever looked at a crow perched on a balcony wire and wondered what is going on behind its sharp, curious eyes? It turns out that these feathered neighbours possess lightning-fast minds. On 22 October 2026, scientists in Germany revealed an astonishing finding about how crows visual decisions happen twice as fast as those made by humans and other primates!

The exciting study was published in the famous journal Science. Researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Professor Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen discovered that these clever black birds can examine what they see and make up their minds in the blink of an eye.

What happened?

The research team at the Institute of Neurobiology in Tübingen invited two carrion crows to try out a special touchscreen game. The birds stood in front of a monitor that displayed clouds of moving white dots drifting across a dark background.

While some of the white dots moved around randomly, others travelled together towards either the left or the right side. The crows had to watch carefully, work out which way the dots were heading, and peck a target to show the correct direction. Whenever they chose correctly, the birds earned a tasty mealworm reward.

The crows proved to be absolute champions at the game. They took an average of only 235 milliseconds—which is less than a quarter of a single second—to analyse the motion and peck their answer. When the movement of the dots was clear, the birds reached an accuracy score of nearly 100 percent.

While the crows played, the scientists carefully monitored activity inside their brains. They found that decision-making signals began forming just 70 milliseconds after the image appeared on the screen.

The researchers tracked these speedy signals in an avian brain area known as the nidopallium caudolaterale. This clever region works very much like the human prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that helps us think, plan, and solve problems.

Birds and mammals separated on the evolutionary tree over 310 million years ago. Despite this vast gap in history, both types of brains created very similar strategies to tackle visual puzzles.

Scientists believe crows developed this split-second thinking to survive in the wild. While flying at high speeds, they need rapid visual processing to dodge obstacles, hunt for food, and make quick survival choices.

Sources

• idw-online.de
• livescience.com
• uni-tuebingen.de
• thetransmitter.org
• sindexs.org
• yacak.com

This story was prepared by the Kids Gazette news desk with the help of AI research and writing tools, using the sources listed above.

Author: Kids Gazette Desk.