{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "NewsArticle",
    "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/crows-decisions-twice-fast-humans/#article",
    "mainEntityOfPage": "https://badiyaa.com/crows-decisions-twice-fast-humans/",
    "headline": "Carrion crows decide in 235 milliseconds; Tübingen study finds them twice as fast as humans and monkeys",
    "description": "Carrion crows judged moving dots and pecked an answer in 235 milliseconds, twice as fast as humans and monkeys, a University of Tübingen study found.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-13T19:24:00+00:00",
    "dateModified": "2026-11-13T19:24:00+00:00",
    "author": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa Editorial Desk",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/author/editorial-desk/"
    },
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
        "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/#organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/",
        "logo": {
            "@type": "ImageObject",
            "url": "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/badiyaa-logo-color-600x60-1.png",
            "width": 600,
            "height": 60
        },
        "email": "badiyaavideo@gmail.com",
        "publishingPrinciples": "https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/",
        "correctionsPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/corrections/",
        "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/contact/",
        "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://badiyaa.com/about/#ownership",
        "sameAs": [
            "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61595518283625",
            "https://www.instagram.com/badiyaa.com.ai/",
            "https://www.threads.net/@badiyaa.com.ai"
        ],
        "parentOrganization": {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "Rezilient Digital",
            "url": "https://www.rezilientdigital.com/",
            "address": {
                "@type": "PostalAddress",
                "streetAddress": "Fl No 3, Nav Shyam Sadan, Plot No 38, Pestom Sagar, Chembur",
                "addressLocality": "Mumbai",
                "addressRegion": "Maharashtra",
                "postalCode": "400089",
                "addressCountry": "IN"
            },
            "sameAs": [
                "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rezilientdigital"
            ]
        }
    },
    "isAccessibleForFree": true,
    "inLanguage": "en-US",
    "wordCount": 573,
    "image": [
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/carrion-crow-corvus-corone-head-scaled.webp",
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/carrion-crow-corvus-corone-head-1024x634.webp"
    ],
    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "Andreas Nieder, Carrion crow, Corvids, University of Tübingen",
    "articleBody": "Two carrion crows needed just 235 milliseconds, on average, to judge which way a swarm of dots was drifting on a screen and peck their answer, about twice as fast as humans and monkeys manage the same kind of test. The result comes from neurobiologists Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder at Germany’s University of Tübingen, who published the study in Science on October 22. The speed did not cost the birds much accuracy. When the motion was obvious, the crows were right nearly every time, and even on murky trials they beat chance. The dot test The setup is a classic of decision science. A cloud of white dots moves across a black touchscreen, and only some share a direction. The animal has to say whether most of them are heading left or right, here by pecking a target circle on the matching side to earn a reward. Researchers can make the task easy or hard by changing how many dots move together. “Even when the patterns of motion were hard to recognize, the crows’ decisions were still better than random choices,” Schmidbauer said in the university’s announcement, “and with clear signals, they achieved an accuracy of nearly 100 percent.” Watching a decision form While the crows worked, the team recorded single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale, a region of the bird brain often compared with the human prefrontal cortex. Signals for left and right motion began to split just 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared. Activity then climbed steadily as evidence piled up, hit a threshold, and the bird pecked. Some quick arithmetic shows how compressed that is. If 235 milliseconds is the whole response, the brain had already started sorting left from right in under a third of it, about 30 percent of the way in. Doubling 235 also gives a rough idea of the primate benchmark the team compared against: close to half a second. That ramp-to-threshold pattern is the same one textbook models describe in people and monkeys. “These findings show that neuronal dynamics in the avian brain are consistent with established models of decision-making in humans and non-human primates,” Nieder said. Why a bird brain might be faster Birds lack the layered cortex that mammals use for thinking, yet corvids keep matching primates on hard tasks. Carrion crows can tell apart numbers up to 30, switch between rules and recognize faces, which many researchers treat as convergent evolution: different wiring arriving at similar skills. Nieder links the extra speed to life in the air. “Birds rely on their vision to carry out precise, rapid maneuvers during flight and to guide their beaks towards objects when foraging,” he said. Badiyaa readers have met crows before, in our look at why crows gathering in US yards each autumn are heading to huge winter roosts. More animal-brain stories sit on our Science page. Limits The experiment used two birds, which is normal for single-neuron recording work but small for sweeping claims about every crow. The human and monkey figures come from comparable tasks rather than a head-to-head race in the same lab. Nieder said more research is needed to pin down which mechanisms give birds their time advantage, and that is the next step his Tübingen group has flagged. Further reading Wikipedia: Carrion crow Schmidbauer and Nieder, Ultrarapid decision-making in an avian brain (Science, 2026) Image: Alexis Lours, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
    "markdown": "https://badiyaa.com/crows-decisions-twice-fast-humans.md"
}