Day 21: Pigeons may aim for our heads

Credit: Shelley Batts, University of Michigan

New research this week has revealed that pigeons know precisely what they’re doing when they poop on people’s heads.

Okay, not really. But the intelligence gap between people and non-human animals is getting narrower all the time, and pigeons are the latest species to demonstrate that in a lab.

Edward Wasserman, an experimental psychology professor at the University of Iowa, has been leading research showing that both pigeons and baboons can determine that two or more items are the same or different — a skill the famous, turn-of-the-20th Century psychologist William James called the very backbone of human thinking. If you have two pennies in your left hand and a nickel and a dime in your right hand, for example, you can correctly report that the two coins in your left hand are the same and the two coins in your right hand are different.

Baboons and pigeons can do that sort of thing, too.

Previously, Wasserman and colleagues found that baboons could use joysticks to point out sets of computer images involved the same relationship as sets they had recently been shown.

The researchers first familiarized the baboons with a screen display of 16 different icons in a grid pattern, such as the sun, an arrow, a light bulb, a train, and a house, or with a display of the same picture repeated 16 times (for example, all telephones). Researchers then presented the baboons with a series of choices of two new displays. In each choice, one display was a 4-by-4 grid with 16 different icons (for example, a clock, a brain, a hand, a triangle); the other was the 4-by-4 grid with 16 identical icons (for example, all flowers). Researchers rewarded the baboons for selecting, from two choices, the array that showed the same relationships among pictures as the sample.

The baboons did indeed learn to match the “different icons” test grids to sample grids at a rate greater than chance. They also learned to match “same icons” test grids to “same icons” sample grids at a rate greater than chance. It took thousands of trials for them to learn the “relation between relations” required by the task, but they did it. That work was reported in the October issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, published by the American Psychological Association.

Now, Wasserman and colleague Bob Cook, of Tufts University, have repeated the experiment with pigeons; the pigeons learned to peck a computerized touchscreen to accomplish the same feat.

In addition to keeping human egos in check by proving we’re not the only smart creatures on earth, this research may have practical applications, Wasserman said — some of the methods he uses to study baboons and pigeons can be deployed to study human cognition.

“Because we must invent entirely nonverbal methods to study cognition in animals, these same methods may have particular promise for studying children with communicative disorders” like language problems and autism, Wasserman said in a press release. “These methods may prove to have unique diagnostic and therapeutic significance.”

The results were presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago. Other scientists in the same session discussed scrub-jays that exhibit episodic-like memory and future planning, chimpanzees that remember extremely detailed environmental information, monkeys that count and crows that fashion and use tools.