It is a long-time dream of avian neuroscientists to see the pattern of activity in a bird brain while the animal is working on a task. Now, biopsychologists and further colleagues from Bochum established an fMRI platform to investigate visually guided decision-making in awake behaving pigeons. Pigeons discriminated colors in a Go/NoGo paradigm and used their beak opening movements to signal their acceptance or rejection of the stimulus. This approach opens the door to visualize the neural fundaments of perceptual and cognitive functions in birds—a vertebrate class of which some clades are cognitively on par with primates.

Behroozi, M., Helluy, X., Ströckens, F., Meng, G., Pusch, R., Tabrik, S., Tegenthoff, M., Otto, T., Axmacher, N., Kumsta, R., Moser, D., Genc, E. and Güntürkün, O. (2020). Event-Related functional MRI in awake behaving pigeons. Nature Communications. 11, 4715. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18437-1