Pigeons can recognize a Picasso
Maja Mielke
Pigeons can learn to distinguish between paintings by different artists and from different art movements.
In 1995, researchers from Keio University in Japan successfully trained pigeons to discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Monet1. In the same year, they were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award given to scientists whose research “first makes people laugh and then makes them think”.
And indeed—their research not only highlighted the impressive cognitive abilities of one of the most misunderstood bird species, it also opened up fascinating new avenues of research.
Photo by Anand Ramavath on Unsplash
The pigeons (Columba livia) were trained in operant conditioning chambers. They were shown a set of 20 paintings (10 by Monet and 10 by Picasso) in random order and rewarded with food when pecking at the image belonging to the correct artist. Four birds were trained to respond to Monet, and four birds to Picasso.
All pigeons learned to discriminate between the artists with more than 90% accuracy within 6 to 24 training sessions.
This is already impressive on its own—but the researchers took it a step further. They presented the birds with new, previously unseen paintings by Monet and Picasso to test whether they would still respond to the correct artist. They also presented paintings by other artists from the same art movements (Impressionism vs. Cubism).
The researchers found that the birds were able to generalize their knowledge. The accuracy was not as high as with the training set, but Monet-trained pigeons responded more often to the new Impressionist paintings, while Picasso-trained pigeons responded more often to the new Cubist paintings. Rather than simply memorizing a specific set of paintings from the training sessions, the pigeons could generalize their knowledge and form categorical discrimination.
Multiple other studies have indicated that pigeons can discriminate between various forms of visual and musical art. For example:
- They can distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paintings made by children
- They can discriminate between the faces of different pigeons
- They can recognize Charlie Brown in “Peanuts” cartoons
- They can discriminate between music by Bach and Stravinsky
- They can distinguish between different musical chords
(At this point, I’d like to express my frustration that none of the studies I found on this topic—and linked above—are open access. That’s frustrating.)
However, I did find an open-access paper on a study that takes the painting-discrimination topic to the next level. In 2015, researchers from the United States successfully trained pigeons to identify breast cancer in microscope images. And again, the birds were able to generalize their skills after training, correctly identifying cancerous tissue in images they had never seen before. They performed about as well as humans in this medically relevant discrimination task.
A pigeon during a training session, learning to identify cancer tissue in microscopy images. Image from Levenson et al. (2015).
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Watanabe, S., Sakamoto, J., & Wakita, M. (1995). PIGEONS’ DISCRIMINATION OF PAINTINGS BY MONET AND PICASSO. ↩︎