Pigeons, the great art critics

Professor Shigeru Watanabe from Keio University in Japan insists that pigeons are able to criticize art like humans do it. The pigeons manage to do this by putting into practice color and pattern cues as well as their texture. According to the professor’s study pigeons can be tamed to differentiate “good” from “bad.”
Springer’s journal “Animal Cognition” published professor Watanabe’s work online.
Art teacher in a Tokyo school classified children creating art either “good” or “ bad.” Pigeons from the Japanese Society for Racing Pigeons were placed in a chamber and in front of them there was replaced a computer monitor demonstrating children’s art.
During the first series of experiments four pigeons were trained to recognize “good” pictures and as soon as they pecked at the “good” pictures, they were given good food. The pigeons were not rewarded when they pecked on “bad” pictures.
The pigeons were also demonstrated some old “good” and “bad” paintings and the birds pecked at the “good” paintings more often than at the “bad” paintings. What is more interesting about these studies is that as soon as the birds were shown grayscale paintings they were no longer able to distinguish as far as they use color cues.
Mosaic pictures also represented some difficulties for the birds to be distinguished. This is explained by the fact the birds also use pattern cues.
Eight new pigeons were trained to distinguish and recognize the texture of the pictures. Four of the pigeons were able to recognize the watercolor paintings and four were trained to recognize the pastel paintings.
These researches show that like people pigeons use visual cues to differentiate “good” paintings and painting texture.
The brain architecture of human beings greatly differs from that of pigeons’, however both pigeons and humans function in the same way to make complex visual distinction.
Mr. Watanabe considered it important to mention that this research does not deal with advanced artistic judgments, but it shows that pigeons are able to acquire the ability to judge beauty similar to that of humans.

Mariam