Pigeons Can Understand Space and Time, Researchers Say
Asked by The Jerusalem Post to comment, Tel Aviv University School of Zoology Prof. Arnon Lotem – an expert on the relationship among behavior, ecology, and evolution – said the discovery was “not very surprising, but it’s nice to show that it actually works. I’m not sure if they worked on humans in comparison. In general, thinking by pigeons is not very complex. Their conclusions could be a basis for understanding more complex behavior.
Do pigeons Pose a Threat to the Environment?
Pigeons, like crows and others, are aggressively pushing out other bird species, and that may be because they are opportunistic and may be more flexible. Still, pigeons are not as intelligent as parrots that talk, mimic humans, and understand a lot, continued Lotem, who has studied cuckoo birds.
The Ohio researchers sought to tease out two types of learning. One is declarative learning which is predicated on exercising reason based on a set of rules or strategies – a so-called higher level of learning attributed mostly to people. The other, associative learning, centers on recognizing and making connections between objects or patterns, such as “sky-blue” and “water-wet.”
Numerous animal species use associative learning, but only a select few, including dolphins and chimpanzees, are thought to be capable of declarative learning.
Yet AI is all the rage, with computers, robots, surveillance systems, and so many other technologies seemingly “thinking” like humans. But is that really the case, or is AI simply a product of cunning human inputs? Or, as the study’s authors put it, have we shortchanged the power of associative learning in human and animal cognition?
Wasserman’s team devised a “diabolically difficult” test, as he calls it, to find out. Each test pigeon was shown a stimulus and had to decide by pecking a button on the right or left to which category that stimulus belonged. The categories included line width, line angle, concentric rings, and sectioned rings. A correct answer yielded a tasty pellet, while an incorrect response yielded nothing. What made the test so demanding, Wasserman noted, is its arbitrariness: No rules or logic would help decipher the task.