Of all the birds in the world , thepigeondraws the most ire . Despite their reputation as headless “ scab with wings , ” though , they ’re actually prettybrilliant(andbeautiful ) creature . A new subject field addsmoreevidence that the sept of birds known as pigeon are some of the chic birds around , asQuartzalerts us .

In accession to being able todistinguishEnglish vocabulary from nonsensicality Word , spotcancer , and narrate a Monetfrom a Picasso , pigeon can understand abstractionist concepts like quad and fourth dimension , grant to the young study publish in . Their encephalon just do it in a slightly different way than humans ’ do .

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Researchers at the University of Iowa fix up an experiment where they prove pigeons a computer filmdom featuring a static horizontal line . The razzing were supposed to valuate the length of the line ( either 6 centimeters or 24 centimeters ) or the amount of time they saw it ( either 2 or 8 seconds ) . The birds perceived " the long lines to have longer duration , and ancestry longer in duration to also be long in distance , " agree to apress release . This suggest that the concept are processed in the same region of the brain — as they are in the brain of humans and other primates .

But that abstract mentation does n’t occur in the same way in hoot brains as it does in ours . In humans , comprehend distance and clip is linked to a realm of the genius called the parietal cortex , which the pigeon brain miss entirely . So their brains have to have some other elbow room of process the concepts .

The report did n’t determine how , exactly , pigeons achieve this cognitive feat , but it ’s clear that some other aspect of the central queasy system of rules must be controlling it . That also open up the possibility that other non - mammal animals can comprehend quad and time , too , expanding how we call back of other brute ’ cognitive capabilities .

[ h / tQuartz ]