Tübingen researchers find carrion crows solve visual tasks twice as fast as primates

Neurobiologists Andreas Nieder and Philipp Schmidbauer of the University of Tübingen published a study in Science on Oct. 22, 2026, reporting that carrion crows solve perceptual choices about twice as quickly as primates, including people.

The researchers ran two hand-raised carrion crows through the random-dot-motion test, the same assay previously given to monkeys. Iggy and Lemmy faced a touch-sensitive monitor and pecked one of two targets flanking the screen to report which way the coherent dots moved among randomly moving dots. Dot coherence ran from 81 percent, called trivially easy, down to 3 percent, nearly indistinguishable from random motion, and a zero percent condition offered no correct response because no dots moved together. A correct answer earned the birds a mealworm, and they indicated direction by pecking the side where the clustered dots traveled.

The two birds picked the correct side of the screen in an average of 235 milliseconds, finishing thousands of trials while keeping accuracy on par with primates in earlier studies and outpacing those primates by roughly two to one at similar accuracy. Their average accuracy on the direction-judgment task reached 74 percent, matching how primates performed on the same task in earlier research. Activity in the nidopallium caudolaterale, a bird brain region analogous to the primate prefrontal cortex, forecast the birds’ responses as soon as 70 milliseconds after they viewed the stimulus.

This brain area resembles the primate prefrontal cortex and underpins executive functions such as decision-making. Carrion crows do not have the mammalian layered neocortex; they have a nuclear pallium instead (neuron clusters rather than a layered cortex), and their last common ancestor with mammals dates back more than 300 million years. Corvids demonstrate abilities such as counting, recognizing shapes and using tools, and crows and primates handle the same information at different speeds.

Lead investigator Andreas Nieder said the work looked at choices driven by visual cues and did not study economic choices based on weighing values, framing it as perceptual decision-making rather than deliberation. Marc Schmidt, a University of Pennsylvania biology professor not involved in the study, reacted with astonishment and emphasized the comparative approach’s power, calling the speed result surprising and saying differently organized brains can reveal what such work demonstrates. Aaron Blaisdell, who chairs behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles and was not part of the research, said he was pleased to see the two birds agree with each other in a small-N study (a study with a small number of subjects). Nieder asked, “How [would] a differently organized avian brain encode decisions?”