Clever Bird: Pigeons Play Videogames to Get Food [VIDEO]

Pigeons pecking at the ground for the remains of anything vaguely edible might lead some to believe that the birds aren't too clever, but new research from the University of Iowa psychologists suggests the pigeons are capable of using problem-solving skills to make highly intelligent decisions.

It shouldn't be too surprising that pigeons are clever birds. After all, carrier pigeons were entrusted to deliver messages as far back as ancient Persian times, where the art of training the birds likely originated. But a big surprise comes from Edward Wasserman and colleagues' research, which found that pigeons will interact with a touchscreen and play a virtual game, knowing the outcome will be a bit of food.

Wasserman's study was a play on the longstanding "string task," an exercise used as a standard test of intelligence for both humans and animals. For the string task, a treat is attached to one of two strings and researchers observe whether the participant will access the treat by pulling the correct string. In Wasserman's digital version of the string task, the pigeons were presented with a screen with square buttons connected to food dishes that appeared to be full or empty. When the birds pecked at the button connected to the "full" dish, it would move closer to the birds, ultimately to the point where the pigeon would be rewarded with read food.

"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," said Wasserman in a press statement.

It turns out the pigeons are apt pupils, able to make choices that will bring them closer to food between 74 percent and 90 percent of the time across three varieties of string tasks.

The researchers observed that the pigeon were cogent of the connection between the virtual strings and the food dishes, "often looking toward and pecking at the dish as its moves down the screen," the authors wrote.

"These results not only testify to the power and versatility of our computerized string task, but they also demonstrate that pigeons can concurrently contend with a broad range of demanding patterned-string problems, thereby eliminating many alternative interpretations of their behavior," the authors wrote.

As it turns out, pigeons may not be that bird-brained after all.

Wasserman and colleagues' research was published in the journal Animal Cognition.