Pigeons can distinguish real English words from nonsense letter strings.

In a 2016 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers from the University of Otago and the University of Marseille tested the orthographic capabilities of pigeons. The team trained four pigeons to recognize dozens of four-letter English words. The birds successfully distinguished these words from thousands of non-word letter combinations, such as 'URGE' versus 'VREU'.The pigeons were not just memorizing specific words but were actually learning the statistical properties of English orthography. They picked up on which letter pairs, known as bigrams, were more likely to appear in real words. This allowed them to correctly identify new words they had never seen before during the testing phase. One high-performing pigeon named 'Q31' managed to learn a vocabulary of 58 different words.This research is significant because it suggests that the neural circuitry for visual processing is highly flexible across different species. It challenges the idea that reading is a uniquely human skill requiring a complex brain. Instead, the study indicates that the 'visual word form area' in the human brain may have evolved from older visual systems used by our ancestors to identify objects and patterns in nature.The pigeons' performance was comparable to that of baboons tested in similar experiments. By using a reward system of wheat, the researchers proved that these birds could process complex visual information previously thought to be exclusive to primates. This discovery provides a new perspective on the evolutionary origins of literacy and how the brain adapts to recognize written language.