Crows make decisions twice as fast as humans, study reveals

(Web Desk) - Crows have surprised scientists with their remarkable intelligence, with a new study revealing that the birds can make decisions twice as fast as humans and monkeys.

According to international media reports, scientific research in recent years has established that crows can make, store and maintain tools, while also displaying playful behaviour.

A study published in the journal Science has now found that crows can process visual information and make decisions at remarkable speed, outperforming humans and monkeys in certain tasks.

Researchers at Germany's University of Tübingen conducted experiments to examine the birds' decision-making abilities and found that crows took just 235 milliseconds to make a visual decision.

The birds were able to identify patterns of moving dots and respond accordingly in less time than it takes to blink an eye during flight.

During the experiment, crows were shown moving dots on a touchscreen and asked to determine whether the dots were travelling towards the left or right. They indicated their answers by pecking on the corresponding side of the screen.

Researchers found that the birds performed remarkably well, even when the direction of movement was difficult to determine, successfully identifying the correct direction in many instances.

The findings suggest that crows can analyse visual information and respond to it in less than a second.

What particularly surprised researchers was that crows appeared to use similar brain processes for decision-making as humans and other mammals, despite having a significantly different brain structure.

However, scientists have yet to identify the biological mechanisms behind this ability.

In an earlier study published in May 2024, researchers at the same university found that crows could count aloud from one to four. The birds were also able to recognise numbers displayed on a screen and produce the corresponding number of caws.