Pigeons can distinguish between paintings by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso.

In 1995, Shigeru Watanabe and his colleagues at Keio University conducted a landmark study on avian visual perception. They trained pigeons to distinguish between the Impressionist works of Claude Monet and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso. Using operant conditioning, the birds were rewarded with food for pecking at the correct artist's work. The results showed that the pigeons achieved an accuracy rate of over 90 percent during the training phase.The researchers then presented the pigeons with paintings they had never seen before. The birds successfully categorized these new images, demonstrating that they were not just memorizing specific pictures but were identifying general stylistic features. Even when the paintings were presented in grayscale or at low resolution, the pigeons could still differentiate between the two artists. This suggests that they rely on complex geometric patterns and spatial relationships rather than just color.Interestingly, when the paintings were shown upside down, the pigeons' performance dropped significantly for Monet's work but remained stable for Picasso's. This implies that the birds processed Monet's Impressionism as a coherent global image while treating Picasso's Cubism as a collection of distinct local features. This research challenged the long-held belief that complex aesthetic categorization was a uniquely human or primate trait. It highlights the sophisticated neural architecture of the avian brain, which contains a high density of neurons dedicated to visual processing.