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Post by rugbytoffee on Sept 19, 2016 15:15:42 GMT
Some people might consider them the “rats of the air”, but if so they are very smart rats. Pigeons can not only recognize words, but process them in ways similar to primates, learning patterns that help them detect whether strings of letters are more likely to be real words they don’t know, or gibberish. Pigeons have exceptional eyesight and visual processing. They've been trained to recognize cancers on biopsy slides and naturally overthrow incompetent leaders. Researchers led by Dr Damian Scarf of the University of Otago, New Zealand trained 18 pigeons to distinguish words from random strings of letters. The birds were introduced to 308 four-letter words (no, not those ones) that baboons had learned to recognize in a previous study, mixed in among thousands of random strings of letters. Birds were trained to peck at a symbol when shown a word. In each session pigeons were introduced to a new word, followed by refresher sessions on words they had learned before. Birds were considered to know a word when they could identify it more than two-thirds of the time. After eight months the four brightest pupils had learned an average of 14 words. The other birds averaged just four, and Scarf saved resources by limiting further work to his four stars. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scarf reports that the star pupils, after more intensive training, learned between 26 and 57 words. The birds did not learn meanings, only to distinguish real words from gibberish. The numbers are well short of the baboon average of 139 but still show considerable facility for reading.
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Pigeons
Sept 19, 2016 17:24:05 GMT
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Post by bornablue on Sept 19, 2016 17:24:05 GMT
Any animal that flies back to a cage can't be too bright.
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