Pigeons Can Use Touchscreens to Solve Puzzles

Pigeons are perpetually crumbling under the weight of their disease-filled diets of trash and sadness, but it turns out they're also pretty darn smart. In fact, they can even learn to play simple games on touchscreens in order to score food.

Pigeons are fairly intelligent creatures, and their ability to be trained or used as messengers suggests they have a modicum of memory and learning capability. But how smart are they exactly? According to research published in Animal Cognition, pigeons are capable of solving a pattern-based puzzle to earn a food reward. Better yet, they can do so even when the puzzle displayed on a touchscreen—a pretty abstract concept for a bird, wouldn't you say?

The experiment by researchers at the University of Iowa consisted of digital versions of string tasks, which are commonly used in cognition studies. The premise is simple: a study subject is given a pair of strings, with a food reward visibly attached to one of them. If the subject pulls the right string, it wins the reward. Simple, right? Even marmosets can do it.

But in this case, there was a wrinkle. The study pigeons didn't just have to look at two strings, realize one had food on the end of it, understand that pulling the string would bring the food, and act on it. They had to do so in a purely digital fashion.

As you can see in the video above, two strings were drawn on screen, each with a picture of a food dish—one full, one empty—attached to the end of it. Poking at a button at the bottom of the drawn strings reels them in; it looks like it took about a dozen or so pokes to pull in the "string" fully. If the full dish was pulled in, a real food reward was given.

"The pigeons proved that they could indeed learn this task with a variety of different string configurations—even those that involved crossed strings, the most difficult of all configurations to learn with real strings," lead author Edward Wasserman said in a release.

Success rates for pigeons across varying experimental configurations ranged between 74 and 90 percent—pretty high, if you ask me. And really, break it down like you had no idea what a touchscreen was: You see pictures of food, colored lines, and a couple little button things. You can poke or peck aimlessly, but only when you hit the buttons does the screen react. Eventually, you realize that hitting the right button brings the virtual food closer, which eventually results in a real reward.

It's pretty fascinating that pigeons are capable of learning to complete such a task. At the same time, the study shows the sheer intuitiveness of touchscreen interfaces. As opposed to the blinking cursors of yore, touchscreens offer a more physical interface that's easier to interact with.

And it's not limited to pigeons and simple games: How about the incredible story of the Ethopian kids who hacked OLPC tablets without any instructions? The researchers of this study write that their results suggest touchscreens could be used more commonly in cognition experiments, which is cool on its own. But beyond that, it's impressive to think how easy modern devices and interfaces are to learn and use. If tablets are so easily picked up that pigeons can use them, perhaps the PC market really is dead.

@derektmead