Study: crows solve a visual task in an average of 235 milliseconds

Crows can make surprisingly fast decisions in certain visual tasks, according to a study published in the journal Science on 22 October. Two trained crows identified the direction of moving dots on a screen in an average of about 235 milliseconds.

Researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen examined both the birds' behaviour and the activity of nerve cells in their forebrains. Some neurons signalled an upcoming choice as early as around 70 milliseconds after the visual stimulus appeared.

The authors compared the measured response times with findings from earlier studies of humans and monkeys. In this specific task, the birds responded about twice as fast without an observed loss of accuracy. However, this was not a direct experiment conducted under exactly the same conditions across all species.

The results highlight the efficiency of neural mechanisms that allow birds to gather visual information and select an action. Such an ability may be linked to the need for fast reactions during flight and navigation.

An important limitation is the small sample of just two birds. The findings do not establish that all crows think faster than humans or compare the species' overall intelligence. They describe a specific ability measured in a controlled visual task.

Source: Schmidbauer and Nieder, Ultrarapid decision-making in an avian brain, Science, 22 October 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.aed6459.

Illustrative photograph of a crow: Veronica Dudarev / Unsplash (Unsplash License). It does not depict the birds used in the experiment.