No wonder pigeons never get lost on the way home. According to psychologists, who spent five years exploring the limits of the birds' brains, the creatures have remarkably good memories.
November 8, 2006 (Press Release) --
No wonder pigeons never get lost on the way home. According to psychologists, who spent five years exploring the limits of the birds' brains, the creatures have remarkably good memories.
The extent of their skills became apparent when scientists flashed images in front of the birds and trained them to peck in a particular place if they recognised an image later on. Pigeons managed to memorise 800 to 1,200 pictures before their memories started to fill and their performance tailed off, said Joël Fagot at the Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences in Marseille, who conducted the study with Robert Cook at Tufts University in Boston. One bird remembered 68% of 1,978 pictures. "Pigeons are very visual animals and we knew they had good memories, but we didn't know they were this good," said Dr Fagot.
Scientists at the University of Pisa found that homing pigeons may navigate using the scents of different neighbourhoods, rather than exploiting subtle variations in the Earth's magnetic field. "In their local area, certainly their impressive memory is going to help, but from farther away, they will be using other techniques to navigate home," said Dr Cook.
The study, reported yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pitted the memory skills of pigeons against those of baboons in a bid to reveal evolutionary differences in brain development. After five years of testing, baboons were able to remember nearly 6,000 images, but the scientists believe they could reach 10,000.
"The pigeons were not nearly as good as the baboons, but they were still quite remarkable," said Dr Fagot. "It might well have been that intelligence has its origin in the evolution of improved memories."
Author: Ian Sample
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
The extent of their skills became apparent when scientists flashed images in front of the birds and trained them to peck in a particular place if they recognised an image later on. Pigeons managed to memorise 800 to 1,200 pictures before their memories started to fill and their performance tailed off, said Joël Fagot at the Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences in Marseille, who conducted the study with Robert Cook at Tufts University in Boston. One bird remembered 68% of 1,978 pictures. "Pigeons are very visual animals and we knew they had good memories, but we didn't know they were this good," said Dr Fagot.
Scientists at the University of Pisa found that homing pigeons may navigate using the scents of different neighbourhoods, rather than exploiting subtle variations in the Earth's magnetic field. "In their local area, certainly their impressive memory is going to help, but from farther away, they will be using other techniques to navigate home," said Dr Cook.
The study, reported yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pitted the memory skills of pigeons against those of baboons in a bid to reveal evolutionary differences in brain development. After five years of testing, baboons were able to remember nearly 6,000 images, but the scientists believe they could reach 10,000.
"The pigeons were not nearly as good as the baboons, but they were still quite remarkable," said Dr Fagot. "It might well have been that intelligence has its origin in the evolution of improved memories."
Author: Ian Sample
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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