Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
How do you test how smart a pigeon is? You could try an avian version of the “Name Game”. Show the pigeon 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. Then train it to peck on one of two different symbols: the correct one for that photo and an incorrect one randomly chosen from one of the remaining 15 categories.
But remember, before you judge the little chap too harshly, a pigeon’s brain is only the size of the tip of a human index finger. In spite of that tiny bird brain, pigeons are a talented bunch of birds. There is, of course, their legendary “homing instinct” that helps them find their way home from hundreds of miles away, even when blindfolded. Their eyesight is better than a human’s, and pigeons have even been trained by the U. S. Coast Guard to spot the orange life jackets of people lost at sea. They have long been used by armed forces to carry vital messages in times of war, and nobody can count how many lives have been saved by courier pigeons carrying secret and strategic information.
Basically, pigeons are just awesome
When researchers from the University of Iowa tried their “naming” experiment out in the lab, they found that 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. Now that’s smart, and the UI study into pigeon power suggests that this demonstrates a remarkable similarity between how pigeons learn the equivalent of words and the way children do.
Other studies into bird intelligence, such as studies of super-smart crows for instance, have shown that avian brains might operate in ways not so different from our own.
The key finding in this new study is that the pigeons can categorize and name both natural and manmade objects. These birds were able to categorized 128 photographs into 16 categories, but, more importantly, they did so simultaneously.
Ed Wasserman, UI professor of psychology and corresponding author of the study, said “Unlike prior attempts to teach words to primates, dogs, and parrots, we used neither elaborate shaping methods nor social cues. And our pigeons were trained on all 16 categories simultaneously, a much closer analog of how children learn words and categories.” The study has been published online in the journal Cognition.
Wasserman has studied animal intelligence for decades and believes that animals are much smarter than we once thought and that they have a lot more to teach us.
“It is certainly no simple task to investigate animal cognition; But, as our methods have improved, so too have our understanding and appreciation of animal intelligence,” he added. “Differences between humans and animals must indeed exist: many are already known. But, they may be outnumbered by similarities. Our research on categorization in pigeons suggests that those similarities may even extend to how children learn words.”
“Children are confronted with an immense task of learning thousands of words without a lot of background knowledge to go on,” said UI psychologist Bob McMurray, another author of the study. “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.”
The inspiration for the UI study came from a project which was published in 1988 and featured in The New York Times in which UI researchers discovered pigeons could distinguish four categories of objects. This latest experiments took this a step further. This time, the UI researchers used three pigeons and a computerized version of the “name game” with the 16 categories and 128 objects.
“Ours is a computerized task that can be provided to any animal, it doesn’t have to be pigeons,” said McMurray. “These methods can be used with any type of animal that can interact with a computer screen.”
The UI team acknowledges that the recent pigeon study is not a direct analogue of word learning in children and more work needs to be done. But they think the model used in the study could lead to a better understanding of the associative principles involved in the way children learn words.
“That’s the parallel that we’re pursuing,” says, Wasserman. “But a single project–however innovative it may be–will not suffice to answer such a provocative question.”
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