Crows Pick a Direction in 235 Milliseconds, About Twice the Speed Seen in Humans and Monkeys

23 OCT 2026 — Two carrion crows took about 235 milliseconds on average to judge which way a cloud of dots was drifting and peck their answer, a two-person team from Germany's University of Tübingen reports in a study published in Science on 22 October 2026. Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder of the university's Institute of Neurobiology say that is roughly double the speed observed in monkeys or humans.

The birds did not trade accuracy for that speed, the authors report. Recordings from their brains also showed the choice taking shape long before the beak moved.

What the crows were asked to do

The abstract calls it a classic visual motion discrimination task. Dots move across a touchscreen, and the animal has to say whether most of them are heading left or right. The crows answered by pecking a target circle on the matching side of the pattern to receive a reward, the university's press release explains.

Some patterns were hard to make out and others were clear, and the birds were tested across both.

On the hardest patterns the crows still did better than chance, Schmidbauer said in the release, "and with clear signals, they achieved an accuracy of nearly 100 percent."

Faster than the primate benchmark

The headline comparison comes from the paper's abstract, which says the choices arrived "roughly twice as fast as has been observed in monkeys or humans and without sacrificing accuracy". The wording matters. The comparison is with results reported in earlier work, and Live Science, in its report on the study, noted that the team did not test crows against humans and monkeys on the exact same task.

That caveat does not undo the result. It does mean the factor of two is a comparison across separate studies, and that the speed figure rests on two birds.

Watching the decision form

The second half of the work happens inside the head. The researchers recorded neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale, an associative region of the bird brain that the release likens to the human prefrontal cortex.

Neurons tuned to a direction of motion began to encode the coming choice within about 70 milliseconds of the dots appearing, the abstract says, and about 170 milliseconds before the response. Their activity ramped up as the decision formed, scaled with the strength of the sensory evidence and converged when the bird responded.

The release describes activity rising until it reaches a decision threshold, at which point the crow indicates its choice, and says the neurons tracked both the strength of the visual information and the direction the bird picked.

A different brain, similar principles

Birds have no layered cerebral cortex, so the parallel is not anatomical. Nieder's argument is that the computation looks alike even though the tissue is organised differently.