They may not look it , but pigeon are surprisingly chic shuttlecock . With a short assistance from man , they can find out todeliver messages , spotcancer cells on a mammogram , and even distinguish between the paintings ofPablo Picasso and Claude Monet . Now , the lateststudyon pigeon reason , published in the journalPNAS , finds that the remarkably bright razzing can even distinguish between write word and nonsensical strings of letter .
Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany trained pigeons to peck four - missive English words as they appeared on a cover , or peck a separate symbol when a four - alphabetic character nonsense term appeared . Over meter , they rail four pigeons to build “ vocabulary ” of between 26 and 58 written words . They found that not only could the pigeons successfully identify the words they ’d memorize , they could often identify newfangled words they ’d never see .
Though they lacked decoding skill , the study close that the birds were capable of processing orthographic information . That is , though the snort were unable to record and sympathise the Word they saw , they were still capable to successfully name ocular formula ( or “ orthographic properties ” ) that define words . For representative , researchers watch that the pigeons could recognise “ bigram ” ( missive pairs ) that were associated with Christian Bible . They learned to distinguish bigram commonly used in words ( for example , “ AL ” and “ EL ” ) for tell apart quarrel from nonsense .
The findings are significant , not only because they show pigeonsshouldn’t be dismissedas “ bird - brain , ” but because they reveal that orthographic encyclopaedism is n’t unique to humans and other order Primates . In a financial statement , researcher Onur Güntürkünsaid , “ That pigeon — separate by 300 million long time of evolution from humans and having vastly unlike encephalon architectures — show such a skill as orthographic processing is amazing . ”
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