Washington, Dec 23 (ANI): Pigeons have brilliant mathematical competence and have the ability to decipher between different amounts of number-like objects, order pairs, and learn abstract mathematical rules, a new study has revealed.
Apart from humans, only rhesus monkeys have exhibited such skills.
"It would be fair to say that, even among birds, pigeons are not thought to be the sharpest crayon in the box," the Discovery News quoted lead author Damian Scarf as saying.
"I think that this ability may be widespread among birds. There is already clear evidence that it is widespread among primates," he noted.
Scarf, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago, and colleagues Harlene Hayne and Michael Colombo started the study by first teaching pigeons how to order the numbers 1, 2 and 3.
To do this, they presented three images to the pigeons, containing one, two, or three objects.
All three images appeared at once on a touch screen and the pigeons pecked the screen to make a response. If the task, which involved pecking the images in ascending order, was accomplished accurately, they received a wheat snack.
Next, the researchers increased the ante to determine if the pigeons had just learned to order 1, 2, and 3, or if they had learned a more abstract rule.
Scarf and his team presented the pigeons with pairs of images containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 objects. The pigeons again had to pair the items in ascending order.
"Remarkably, the pigeons were able to respond to these novel pairs correctly.In addition, their performance was indistinguishable from that of two rhesus monkeys that had been previously trained on this task," Scarf added.
The study has been published in the latest issue of the journal Science. (ANI)
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