Researchers Pigeons are significantly better in multitasking than humans

Pigeons are fast in multitasking
In general, pigeons are not very clever. "You stupid dove" is called, for example, a common saying. But a study now shows that pigeons can quickly switch between two tasks like humans. In some situations, the pigeons are even faster than humans, as a research showed. As a cause for the slight advantages of birds in multitasking biopsychologists suspect the higher density of neurons in the brain of the pigeons.

The distance between nerve cells in pigeons is half that of humans. When groups of nerve cells repeatedly have to exchange information very quickly, pigeons are faster (© Onur Güntükürn)
In the journal "Current Biology" Dr. Sara Letzner and Prof. Dr. med. Dr. H. c. Onur Güntürkün of the Ruhr-University Bochum the results together with Prof. Dr. med. Christian Beste from the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus at the Dresden University of Technology.

Pigeons are fast in multitasking. (Image: missisya / fotolia.com)

"For a long time, it has been believed that mammalian six-layer cerebral cortex is the anatomical source of cognitive ability," says Sara Letzner. Birds do not have such a structure. "So building the mammalian cortex can not be the prerequisite for complex cognitive functions such as multitasking," Letzner continued.

Packed six times closer
The brain-sheath of birds, the pallium, does not have any layers comparable to the human cortex. For this, the neurons are packed therein more densely than in the human cerebral cortex: For example, pigeons have six times more nerve cells per cubic millimeter of brain than humans. As a result, the average distance between two neurons in pigeons is only half that of humans. Since the signals from nerve cells are transmitted equally rapidly in birds and mammals, the researchers had assumed that information can be processed more quickly in the bird's brain than in mammals.

They tested this hypothesis with a multitasking task involving 15 people and 12 pigeons. The human and animal subjects had to stop an ongoing action in the attempt and change as soon as possible to an alternative action. The change to the alternative action took place either simultaneously with the stopping of the first action or with a short delay of 300 milliseconds.

What makes pigeons faster
In the first case, real multitasking takes place, so two processes take place in parallel in the brain: namely, the stopping of the first action and the change to the alternative action. Both pigeons and people are slowed down by the double burden in the same extent.

In the second case - change to the alternative action after delay - however, the processes in the brain change: the two processes, ie the stopping of the first action and the change to the second action, alternate as in a ping-pong game. To do this, the groups of nerve cells that control the two processes must constantly send signals back and forth. The researchers suspected that pigeons would have to be at an advantage because of the greater density of nerve cells. In fact, they were 250 milliseconds faster than humans.

"In cognitive neuroscience, it has long been a mystery how birds with such small brains and without a cortex can be so clever that some of them, such as crows and parrots, can cognitively take on chimpanzees," says Letzner. The results of the current study give a partial answer: Especially through the small, but densely packed brain, birds reduce processing times in tasks that require rapid interaction between groups of neurons.
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The study was financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft within the framework of the project "Development of a neuronal causal model on mechanisms of target activation processes in 'multitasking'" (GU 227 / 20-1, BE4045 / 20-1) as well as through SFB 874 and SFB 940 , Project B8.

original publication
Sara Letzner, Onur Güntürkün, Christian Best: How birds outperform humans in multi-component behavior, in: Current Biology, 2017, DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2017.07.056