Pigeons Can Understand Space and Time, Researchers Say
“These stimuli are special. They don’t look like one another, and they’re never repeated,” said Wasserman, who has studied pigeon intelligence for five decades. “You have to memorize the individual stimuli or regions from where the stimuli occur in order to do the task.”
Each of the four test pigeons began by correctly answering about half the time. But over hundreds of tests, the quartet eventually upped their score to an average of 68% right. “The pigeons are like AI masters,” Wasserman declared. “They’re using a biological algorithm, the one that nature has given them, whereas the computer is using an artificial algorithm that humans gave them.”
The common denominator is that AI and pigeons both employ associative learning, yet base-level thinking allows the pigeons to score successfully ultimately. Wasserman says that if people were to take the same test, they’d score poorly and probably give up.
“The goal was to see to what extent a simple associative mechanism was capable of solving a task that would trouble us because people rely so heavily on rules or strategies,” Wasserman adds. “In this case, those rules would get in the way of learning. The pigeon never goes through that process. It doesn’t have that high-level thinking process. But it doesn’t get in the way of their learning. In fact, in some ways, it facilitates it.”
Wasserman sees a paradox in how associative learning is viewed. “People are wowed by AI doing amazing things using a learning algorithm much like the pigeon,” he says, “yet when people talk about associative learning in humans and animals, it is discounted as rigid and unsophisticated.”
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