Nature & Environment

Crows can make decisions twice as fast as humans, study finds

By T.K. Randall
October 28, 2026

Image: Carrion Crow
Credit: Pavel Sirotkin / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) Members of the corvid family, which include ravens, crows and jays, have long been known to possess a remarkable level of intelligence with the capacity to remember human faces, solve puzzles, navigate complex environments and even hold funerals for their own dead.

Now, according to new research, crows are particularly good at decision making, too, given that they are able to make decisions twice as fast as humans and apes.

In an experiment, crows were tasked with determining if dots on a screen were moving left or right, something they were able to indicate by pecking at the screen.While this was happening, the researchers monitored parts of the bird's brain to record the activity.

Remarkably, they took an average of just 235 milliseconds to identify the dot's direction.

"Even when the patterns of motion were hard to recognize, the crows' decisions were still better than random choices and with clear signals, they achieved an accuracy of nearly 100%," said Philipp Schmidbauer of the Institute of Neurobiology of the University of Tubingen.

The findings are consistent with the need for more rapid visual processing and motor response in birds than in humans and apes, especially during flight and when foraging for food.

Source: Phys.org

Tags: Crows, Birds