Crows can evaluate visual info twice as fast as mammals
by Jacek Krywko from Ars Technica - All content on (#798RX)
Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. In a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the subject tries to determine whether-and in which direction- it's moving. The task has shown that in the primate neocortex, neurons gather visual evidence over time, with their firing rates climbing until they cross a threshold, when the animal commits to a decision.
But avian brains don't have a neocortex, so it wasn't obvious how they made similar decisions.
This was the big question," said Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tubingen. How [would] a differently organized avian brain encode decisions?"