Parents may praise their children’s artwork as if each piece were a da Vinci or a Rembrandt – but pigeons, new research suggests, are somewhat more discerning.
Several birds have successfully learned to tell the difference between well-executed and crude paintings – all created by 9 to 11-year-olds at a Tokyo elementary school.
No, the city hasn’t devised a plot to simultaneously rid its streets of pigeons and employ art teachers that work for peanuts – or, rather, grain. Instead, the experiments were set up to see if other animals, provided with enough training, could grasp the human concept of beauty, says Shigeru Watanabe, a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo, who led the study.
This isn’t Watanabe’s first efforts to teach art appreciation to pigeons. In 1995, he and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to discriminate Picasso paintings from Monets – work that earned him that year’s Ig Nobel prize. New Scientist plays no role in selecting winners, but Watanabe’s latest study make a strong case for another award.. continue reading at New Scientist Magazine
