Crows may make lightning-fast decisions, sometimes twice as fast as humans, study hints

Key Points:

• New research published in Science shows carrion crows can make certain visual decisions in about 235 milliseconds, significantly faster than humans and monkeys in comparable tasks, suggesting advanced cognitive abilities.
• In the study, two crows accurately identified the predominant direction of moving dots on a screen, maintaining high accuracy even with minimal visual cues, indicating strong decision-making skills without sacrificing speed.
• Neural recordings revealed that crows use a decision-making process in the nidopallium caudolaterale, a brain region analogous to the human prefrontal cortex, demonstrating that sophisticated computations do not require a mammalian neocortex.
• The researchers propose that evolutionary pressures from birds' complex flight and foraging behaviors may have favored rapid information processing, although the exact reasons for crows' faster decisions compared to primates remain unclear.
• This study challenges traditional views on intelligence by suggesting that different species may have evolved unique yet effective computational strategies, highlighting the value of comparative research across animal brains.