Crows Make Visual Decisions Twice as Fast as Monkeys or Humans

Two researchers at the University of Tübingen report that carrion crows made deliberate choices in a standard visual motion test in about 235 milliseconds on average, roughly twice as fast as has been observed in monkeys or humans, and without losing accuracy. The work was published Oct. 22, 2026, in Science.

The paper gives the reason for testing a bird at all: this kind of decision-making is well studied in mammals, while how it works in other vertebrates remains unclear. The speed comparison is with earlier published measurements in monkeys and people, not a side-by-side experiment.

The test asks an animal to judge which way a pattern is moving and to signal the answer. Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder, both at the Animal Physiology Unit of the Institute of Neurobiology in Tübingen, recorded from single cells in the crow forebrain while the birds worked. Cells tuned to the direction of motion carried the coming choice as early as about 70 milliseconds after the pattern appeared and about 170 milliseconds before the bird answered. Activity in those cells built up in step with how strong the visual evidence was and converged as the response began.

Schmidbauer and Nieder call the speed unprecedented and the bird's decision circuitry extraordinarily efficient. They also offer a hedged explanation: the speed was possibly shaped by evolutionary pressure for fast, visually guided movement.