The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

Shigeru Watanabe explores the thorny question of how another creature may experience aesthetics at his lab in Keio University in Japan. Some years ago, Watanabe tested the ability of birds to discriminate between human paintings of different styles—for example, cubist from impressionist. In the earliest such study, he trained eight pigeons to distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet. The pigeons came from the Japanese Society for Racing Pigeons; the paintings, from photos of reproductions in an art book. The experimenters trained the pigeons to spot ten different Picassos and ten different Monets by rewarding them when they pecked at the pictures. Then they tested the birds with new paintings by the artists, never seen during training—and with paintings by different artists in the same style. Not only could the pigeons pick out a new Monet or Picasso, they could also tell other impressionists (Renoir, for instance) from other cubists (such as Braque). (This early work won the scientists an Ig Nobel Prize for “achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.”) To probe whether birds might be capable of making distinctions based on human concepts of beauty, Watanabe trained pigeons to distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, as defined by human critics. He found that the birds could indeed pick out the beautiful from the ugly using cues of color, pattern, and texture. All well and good, but do birds prefer any particular style of painting? To...