On Thursday, the 4th of November 2021, Neslihan successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "Perceptual Decision Making and Visual Perception in Pigeons”.

Neslihan’s PhD experiments are a highly innovative and technically advanced series of studies that go all the way through visual perception, action, and cognition in birds. To this end, Neslihan developed novel technical approaches to gain deep insights into diverse aspects of avian cognitive neuroscience. Two major insights stand out among many further ones. First, Neslihan discovered that the process of decision making in pigeons strongly resembles evidence accumulation curves known from mammals. Thus, this core sensory computation seems to be identical since 315 million years of separate evolution. Second, pigeons do not recognize themselves in the mirror but also don’t take their mirror image as another pigeon. Instead, for them the guy in the mirror seems to be an uncanny individual. The committee, consisting of Thomas Bugnyar, Jonas Rose, Giorgio Vallortigara, and Onur Güntürkün was highly impressed by these achievements and were convinced that she fully deserves to be awarded a PhD.
Congratulations Neslihan! We all are very proud of you!