2009-06-26
Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is quoted as saying, 'Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi' (the face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter). Today we use this original quote in the slightly abbreviated form as “the eyes are the window to the soul”. Indeed, countless eye-tracking studies have uncovered hidden intentions and hot spots of attention by observing the eye movements of human volunteers. Unfortunately, bird researchers were until recently excluded from this rich source of knowledge since it is impossible to comparably track eye movements of birds. Now, scientists from the Biopsychology laboratory in Bochum invented a fast way to track the peck locations of pigeons while these animals discriminated hundreds of photographs that contained humans or just landscapes and other objects. Peck location tracking is an indirect way to trace the foci of attention of pigeons. Once this method was established, the scientists were up to a surprise: The birds specifically pecked onto the humans in the pictures. Thus, they attended to the critical portion of the pictures and aimed at these areas. But even more than that: the animals focused on the heads of humans. When these heads were cut out, discrimination success of the birds dropped significantly. So, reading a pigeon’s mind reveals that for them it is our face that makes us human.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is quoted as saying, 'Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi' (the face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter). Today we use this original quote in the slightly abbreviated form as “the eyes are the window to the soul”. Indeed, countless eye-tracking studies have uncovered hidden intentions and hot spots of attention by observing the eye movements of human volunteers. Unfortunately, bird researchers were until recently excluded from this rich source of knowledge since it is impossible to comparably track eye movements of birds. Now, scientists from the Biopsychology laboratory in Bochum invented a fast way to track the peck locations of pigeons while these animals discriminated hundreds of photographs that contained humans or just landscapes and other objects. Peck location tracking is an indirect way to trace the foci of attention of pigeons. Once this method was established, the scientists were up to a surprise: The birds specifically pecked onto the humans in the pictures. Thus, they attended to the critical portion of the pictures and aimed at these areas. But even more than that: the animals focused on the heads of humans. When these heads were cut out, discrimination success of the birds dropped significantly. So, reading a pigeon’s mind reveals that for them it is our face that makes us human.
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Last update: Oct 10, 2023
