Scientists: Crows Think Twice As Fast As Humans
- 1.11.2026, 9:55
The study was conducted in Germany.
Crows make decisions based on what they see about twice as fast as humans and monkeys. This was discovered by neuroscientists at the University of Tübingen in Germany; their study was published in the journal *Science*. ScienceAlert reported on the findings.
Researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder tested the crows using a classic test. This test is used to study how the brain makes decisions based on what the eyes see. Previously, only humans and monkeys had taken this test; this was the first time it was applied to crows.
The crow was placed in front of a touchscreen with numerous dots. Some of the dots began moving to the left or right, and the bird had to determine the direction and peck at the target on the same side of the screen. For a correct answer, the crow was rewarded with a mealworm.
They were given plenty of time to make a decision so that the bird would choose an answer when it was confident in it, rather than simply rushing to finish. To ensure the crows mastered the task, each one underwent more than 100 training sessions before the experiment.
As a result, the birds responded in an average of 235 milliseconds. According to the authors, this is roughly twice as fast as the response times shown by monkeys and humans in similar tests. At the same time, speed did not compromise the accuracy of the responses.
However, the study has an important caveat: it involved only two adult male crows. Therefore, it is not yet possible to say that these results are guaranteed to apply to crows in general.
In the second phase, the scientists implanted electrodes into the birds’ caudolateral nidopallium—a region of the brain containing neurons responsible for perceiving the direction of movement. After the surgery, the crows tackled the same task again, and the researchers recorded the activity of 248 individual neurons.
It turned out that signals associated with the upcoming choice appeared in these neurons as early as 70 milliseconds after the dots began to move. It took another 170 milliseconds or so before the birds pecked at the screen.
According to the authors, the computational dynamics in crows are similar to those in primates, although their neural architecture is completely different, and their brains operate significantly more efficiently in terms of processing time. Scientists attribute this speed to evolution.
“Birds rely on vision to perform precise and rapid maneuvers in flight and to direct their beaks toward objects when foraging,” explained Andreas Nieder.
It should be noted that the experiment involved black crows, which are not found in Belarus. They live in Western Europe, while gray crows inhabit our region. However, genetically, these birds are extremely closely related—as research from the University of Munich has shown, they differ mainly in their plumage coloration. Most likely, there is no significant difference in the brain between the species.
Researchers are interested not only in how intelligent crows are, but also in how they manage to do so with a brain structured quite differently from ours. In humans and other mammals, complex information is processed by the cerebral cortex. Birds lack such a cortex, and this task is performed by other parts of the brain. A bird’s brain is smaller, but the neurons in it are smaller and more densely packed, so signals have to travel a shorter distance.
“Thanks to this structure of the telencephalon, which arose independently during evolution, corvids have twice as many neurons as primates of the same mass. All in all, this results in enormous computational power packed into a small, densely packed ‘bird brain,’” Nieder wrote in a scientific article nearly ten years ago.
This isn’t the first time corvids have surprised scientists. This family includes birds such as the crow, raven, rook, jackdaw, and jay. New Caledonian crows can craft composite tools and plan actions three steps ahead. Western scrub jays have been found to possess a form of episodic memory—that is, the ability to remember what happened, where, and when. And crows, as ScienceAlert reports, are described as “smart enough to be paranoid.”