They may be scrabbling for your bagel crumbs today, but it's only a matter of time before pigeons assume their role as our feathery overlords.
Winged rats can read, or at least memorize and recognize some words, new research has found.
In a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported by Popular Science, scientists taught four especially bright pigeons to distinguish between 26 and 58 four-letter words from random sequences of four characters.
The brainy birds were even able to differentiate between correctly spelled words and those with a swapped set of letters, like "very and "vrey."
Human children learning to read often fail to see a difference between the two, a mistake that adults — and pigeons, it now appears — rarely make.
Columba livia may not be able to comprehend the meaning of words or interpret their sounds, but they can commit visual patterns to memory, as the section of the human brain called the "visual word form area" does.
In other news that will bring your self esteem as a human being down a notch, pigeons may be less likely to follow misguided leaders than our fellow humans, a study published earlier this month in Biology Letters suggests.
When researchers at the University of Oxford used "clock-shifting" to disorient a homing flock's head pigeon and direct it away from its homeward path, the other birds didn't simply fall in line.
The study's authors reset the pigeon's internal circadian rhythms by turning artificial lights on and off in a sealed room at intervals out of sync with the sun's rising and setting.
When the leader pigeon flew in the wrong direction, the rest of the birds in the flock corrected the course. Some jockeyed for the top spot and others abandoned the group entirely.
"Our study demonstrates that flexible decision-making structures can be valuable in situations where ‘bad’ information is introduced by otherwise influential individuals," the paper reads.
