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Carrion crow neurons encode an upcoming motion choice about 70 milliseconds after onset
That early, evidence-weighted buildup is the mechanism the paper puts at the center of an unusually quick visuomotor decision loop.
In this story
- Schmidbauer and Nieder measured the choice time of two carrion crows at about 235 milliseconds.
- Science places that pace at about twice the choice times observed in monkeys or humans on this kind of task.
- Direction-selective neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale encoded the coming choice about 70 milliseconds after the stimulus.
- The record is one motion task in two birds, and the university release leaves the mechanism of that speed unnamed.
Direction-selective neurons in the pallial endbrain of carrion crows begin to encode an upcoming choice about 70 milliseconds after a motion stimulus appears, and about 170 milliseconds before the bird responds, with ramping activity that scales with sensory evidence, according to the 2026 Science abstract.
Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder, both at the Animal Physiology Unit in the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, reported the work as a research article in Science on 22 October 2026, volume 394, issue 6822, pages 445-449 (DOI 10.1126/science.aed6459). The journal page lists the manuscript as received on 4 November 2025 and accepted on 25 August 2026, and the authors declare no competing interests. The design was a controlled visual motion discrimination experiment in two carrion crows, Corvus corone.
The 2026 Science abstract states that those two crows reported choices in that task in approximately 235 milliseconds on average, and that the pace is roughly twice as fast as has been observed in monkeys or humans, without a sacrifice of accuracy. A University of Tübingen release of 22 October 2026 says the birds indicated the choice by pecking a point to the left or right of a moving-dot pattern. In that release, Philipp Schmidbauer says that even with motion patterns that were hard to recognize, the birds’ decisions were above chance, and that with clear signals they reached an accuracy of nearly 100 percent.
Editor Sacha Vignieri’s summary on the Science page calls the nidopallium caudolaterale the functional analog of the primate prefrontal cortex. In the same Tübingen release, Andreas Nieder says the results show neural dynamics in the bird brain that are compatible with established computational models of decision-making in human and nonhuman primates, and that birds have to use their vision to steer fast flight maneuvers precisely and to guide the beak to an object while foraging. The release adds that further studies have to clarify which mechanisms produce the time advantage. National Geographic Poland published a secondary account by Jonasz Przybył on 1 November 2026 that framed ravens and crows as thinking even twice as fast as humans and monkeys.
The finding comes from two carrion crows on one visual motion discrimination task.
This is a single study of two carrion crows on one visual motion task.