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BY EMILY SPAIN
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Need help with that calculation? How about asking a pigeon for help?! You heard right, apparently those badgering birds are good at math. Here’s ABC with more on the pigeon smarts.
“It turns out, they’re math whizzes. A New Zealand study finds they cannot only count, which lots of animals can do, they can actually learn abstract rules about numbers too. That makes them as smart as monkeys. Or as one researcher put it they are the Einsteins of the bird world.”
Researchers first trained pigeons to count to 3 and then using a touchscreen they presented pigeons with different sets of images that the birds had to order correctly. On average, the feathered smarties did it right more than 70 percent of the time. One researcher told Fox News why:
"Pigeons are the perfect subjects for visual tasks, because their vision is really good and they're really easy to train... It appears that you can train them on almost any task you can train monkeys on."
Pigeons as smart as monkeys? Maybe. Scientists found the “distance effect” was similar in the animals. The greater the distance between the numbers in the pairs the faster and better the pigeons were, like monkeys. Researchers told the Daily Mail, this finding could change what we know about animals.
‘While this is obviously a long way away from how humans can count, it shows that an animal with a brain structured quite differently to ours is still able to perform complex mental tasks of which only humans were once thought capable.”
So believe it or not these birds are clever. A writer for Gawker sarcastically comments about what the pigeon’s talent means for me and you.
“Yes: birds—who, let us never forget, once dominated the planet as dinosaurs—are sitting around their bird compounds, counting and ranking objects. Ranking! One day they will use those skills when they round us up for the birdseed mines.”
Pigeons did have a little incentive to perform well... Researchers gave the birds wheat seeds when they chose correctly.
Transcript by Newsy.
