Science News Review

Pigeon Self-Recognition Better Than 3-Year Old Human’s

Jun 17 at 3:03pm by Aileen

Science Daily reported over the weekend that Keio University research has demonstrated that pigeons show superior self-recognition abilities to three year old humans.

Professor Shigeru Watanabe and graduate student Kohji Toda managed to train pigeons to recognize themselves in real-time using mirrors and videotape, then found that their pigeons can recognize themselves in video images with a 5 to 7 second delay. Human 3-year olds typically have trouble recognizing themselves with just a 2 second delay.

Thus pigeons now join chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and elephants in having the ability to recognize themselves, which means that particularly large brains aren’t necessary to the ability. It seems that we are learning that the other forms of life we share our planet with are quite a bit smarter than we’ve traditionally given them credit for!