Pigeons, often considered pests of urban centers, may not be the most praised animals by their intelligence, but a new study presents evidence that they are capable of solving problems in a à artificial intelligence (IA).
It's not that they are technological, or use chips or anything like that. Apparently, problem solving is not this species' strong point!
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Although the research was published on September 21 of this year in the journal iScience, the release took place only on October 25th by the Ohio State University, in the U.S.
In the study, a researcher from the institution and a colleague from the University of Iowa evaluated the cognitive abilities of 24 adult male and female common pigeons (Columba livia).
In the new research, scientists evaluated pigeons that had no prior experience with visual stimuli or the tasks to which they would be subjected, although they have already been done through several previous tests in the laboratory.
This built on previous studies carried out in 2017 by experts at the University of Iowa, which demonstrated that pigeons have a sense of space and time.
In addition to these, other research indicated that these birds learned to solve complex tasks categorization, although they did not use the same human thought processes, such as selective attention and rules explicit.
During the research, the pigeons were visually stimulated with various widths and angles, concentric rings and sectioned rings.
The challenge was to peck a button to the right or left to indicate which category each stimulus belonged to. If they got it right, they received food, but if they got it wrong, they received no reward. The study involved four different tasks, some more complex than others.
Throughout the process, the pigeons improved their success rates through trial and error, increasing the percentage of correct answers from around 55% to 95% in the simplest tasks and from 55% to 68% in the most difficult.
The study was led by professors Brandon Turner, from Ohio State University, and Edward A. Wasserman of the University of Iowa. They tested a simple AI model to see if it could solve problems in the same way as pigeons, and the experiment was successful.
The AI model faced the same tasks as the birds, using the two basic mechanisms that pigeons were believed to use: associative learning and error correction.
Previously, researchers believed that pigeons relied exclusively on associative learning, which relates two phenomena, such as “water” and “wet”.
For example, this is how dogs learn to sit, associating commands with rewards. However, the study revealed that birds are more sophisticated in this regard.
Unlike humans, birds do not try to create rules, but rely on a trial and error method, the same stimulus that is used by artificial intelligence machines.
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