Editing Pigeon intelligence (section)

{{Short description|Intellectual capacity of pigeons}}
{{More citations needed|date=September 2019}}
[[Domestic pigeon|Pigeon]]s have featured in numerous experiments in [[comparative psychology]], including experiments concerned with [[animal cognition]], and as a result there is considerable knowledge of '''pigeon intelligence'''.

Available data show{{Citation needed|date=February 2018}}, for example, that:

*Pigeons have the capacity to share [[attention]] between different dimensions of a stimulus, but (like humans and other animals) their performance with multiple dimensions is worse than with a single stimulus dimension.
*Pigeons can be taught relatively complex actions and response sequences, and can learn to make responses in different sequences.
*Pigeons readily learn to respond in the presence of one simple stimulus and withhold responding in the presence of a different stimulus, or to make different responses in the presence of different stimuli.
*Pigeons can discriminate between other individual pigeons, and can use the behaviour of another individual as a cue to tell them what response to make.
*Pigeons readily learn to make discriminative responses to different categories of stimuli, defined either by arbitrary rules (e.g. green triangles) or by human concepts (e.g. pictures of human beings).
*Pigeons do less well with categories defined by abstract logical relationships, e.g. "symmetrical" or "same", though some experimenters have successfully trained pigeons to discriminate such categories.
*Pigeons seem to require more information than humans for constructing a three-dimensional image from a plane representation.
*Pigeons seem to have difficulty in dealing with problems involving classes of classes. Thus they do not do very well with the isolation of a relationship among variables, as against a representation of a set of exemplars.
*Pigeons can remember large numbers of individual images for a long time, e.g. hundreds of images for periods of several years.

All these are capacities that are likely to be found in most [[mammal]] and [[bird]] species.  In addition pigeons have unusual, perhaps unique, abilities to learn routes back to their home from long distances.  This [[Homing pigeon|homing]] behaviour is different from that of birds that learn [[Bird migration|migration]] routes, which usually occurs over a fixed route at fixed times of the year, whereas homing is more flexible; however similar mechanisms may be involved.

Pigeons showed mirror-related behaviours during the [[mirror test]].<ref>Epstein, Lanza, & Skinner (1981) R. Epstein, R.P. Lanza and B.F. Skinner, “Self-awareness” in the pigeon, Science 212 695-696</ref>