What do you think of this fact?
Pigeons don’t have a great reputation. People call them rats with wings, they peck crumbs off the ground and sit on statues. Hardly anyone would expect them to tell an Impressionist from a Cubist.
An art class paid in birdseed
That is exactly what Shigeru Watanabe tested, a psychology professor at Keio University in Tokyo. According to nippon.com, he showed two groups of pigeons 10 paintings each by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. One group got food for pecking a key when a Monet appeared, the other for a Picasso.
After 20 days, the birds could tell the two painters apart with high accuracy. Watanabe is clear about one thing: the pigeons were responding to the reward, not to a love of art. So they aren’t art critics, but they are surprisingly good at spotting patterns.
Even with paintings they had never seen
It got really interesting when Watanabe showed the pigeons works by other painters. According to nippon.com, they sorted paintings by other Impressionists and Cubists just as well. So the birds hadn’t simply memorized individual pictures, they had picked up something like a style.
Tricks barely threw them off either. According to nippon.com, the pigeons still did well when the images were black and white, upside down, mirrored or cut into pieces.
Bonus fact: According to nippon.com, Watanabe’s pigeons later even learned to sort children’s drawings that adults had rated “beautiful” or “ugly”.
A prize that makes you laugh, then think
In 1995, Watanabe and colleagues received the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. It is awarded by the magazine Improbable Research for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. According to Improbable Research, his team later worked with Queen’s University in Canada to build a virtual 3D pigeon. Real pigeons apparently largely accepted it as one of their own.
Behind the funny experiment is a serious question: how do living things recognize categories, meaning that different things belong together? According to nippon.com, Watanabe links his work to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance”.
The pigeon outside your window might know more about art than you’d think.