Birds May Possess Fundamental Forms of Conscious Perception: Study
In their new article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society BRuhr University Bochum researchers Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün highlight three central areas in which birds show remarkable parallels with the conscious experience of mammals: sensory awareness, neurobiological underpinnings, and accounts of self-awareness.
Maldarelli and Güntürkün show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) that they also possess the neural architecture that may be necessary for this. Image credit: Kutte.
First, studies of sensory awareness indicate that birds not only process stimuli automatically, but experience them subjectively.
When pigeons are confronted with ambiguous visual stimuli, they oscillate between various interpretations, just like humans.
Crows have also been shown to possess neural signals that do not reflect the physical presence of a stimulus, but rather the animal’s subjective perception.
When a crow sometimes consciously perceives a stimulus and at other times certain nerve cells respond precisely based on this internal experience.
Second, bird brains contain functional structures that meet the theoretical requirements for conscious processing, despite their different brain structure.
“The avian equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), is extremely connected and allows the brain to integrate and process information flexibly,” said Dr. Güntürkün.
“The avian forebrain connectome, which displays the entirety of information flow between brain regions, shares many similarities with mammals.”
“Birds thus meet many of the criteria of established theories of consciousness, such as the global neural workspace theory.”
Third, more recent experiments show that birds can have different types of self-perception.
Although some species of corvids pass the traditional mirror test, other ecologically significant versions of tests have shown other types of self-awareness in other bird species.
“Experiments indicate that pigeons and chickens differentiate between their reflection in a mirror and another real member of their species, and react to these depending on the context,” said Dr. Güntürkün.
“It’s a sign of situational and fundamental self-awareness.”
The results suggest that consciousness is an older and more widespread evolutionary phenomenon than previously thought.
Birds demonstrate that conscious processing is also possible without a cerebral cortex and that different brain structures can achieve similar functional solutions.
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Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün. 2025. Conscious Birds. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380 (1939): 20240308; doi: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0308
