Crows make faster, better decisions than humans: study

We’re getting murdered — by a bunch of crows.Put to a test designed to gauge good decision-making skills, the feathered fauna raced past humans, scientists said.These birdbrainiacs move “in the fast lane,” study co-author Andreas Nieder, an animal physiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told the Transmitter, Smithsonian reported.It’s no secret that members of the corvid family — comprised of jays, ravens, jackdaws and more — possess remarkable caw-gnitive abilities.In the past, ravens have been observed planning for the future, while carrion crows have been known to use tools with remarkable precision.What’s surprising is that in some instances, their mental prowess could exceed our own.To determine just how smart crows are, Nieder and his colleague Philipp Schmidbauer subjected two male carrion crows named Iggy and Lenny to a special screen test.They sat in front of a touch monitor displaying a cluster of dots, some of which moved either left or right while other decoy dots shifted randomly to distract them, a statement released by the university explained.When the movement started, the crows pecked either the left or right side of the screen as fast as possible to identify the corresponding specks’ trajectory.Upon guessing correctly, they’d be rewarded with a juicy mealworm.To ensure accuracy, the participants performed the tasks thousands of times before data was collected.

While humans — and monkeys, too — had performed the dot exam before, this marked the first time crows had been tested in this way.The researchers found that the pair displayed “unprecedented speed” with each choice taking approximately 235 milliseconds on average.That was roughly “twice as fast” as the times logged by their human and simian counterparts.Most impressively, the not-so-flighty featherbags made these light-speed decisions without sacrificing accuracy, notably making correct calls 100% of the time when the motion patterns were c...