Bird can “read” human gaze

I keep telling people, can't trust those birds. Billions of them, and everybody assumes they're harmless.

[link to www.world-science.net]

Bird can “read” human gaze

A bird whose eyes look rather like hu­man eyes does an ex­cel­lent job of read­ing our gaze and com­mu­nica­tive ges­tures in­volv­ing eyes, a study has found.

Jack­daws, which are re­lat­ed to crows and ravens, “seem to rec­og­nize the eye’s role in vis­u­al per­cep­tion, or at the very least they are ex­tremely sen­si­tive to the way that hu­man eyes are ori­ent­ed,” said Au­guste von Bay­ern of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Ox­ford and one of the re­search­ers.

When pre­sented with a pre­ferred food, hand-raised jack­daws took sig­nif­i­cantly long­er to re­trieve the re­ward when a per­son was di­rect­ing his eyes to­wards the food than when he was look­ing away, ac­cord­ing to the re­search team led by Na­than Em­ery of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Cam­bridge and Queen Mary Uni­ver­s­ity of Lon­don. The birds hes­i­tat­ed only when the per­son in ques­tion was un­fa­mil­iar and thus po­ten­tially threat­en­ing.

The birds were al­so found to be able to in­ter­pret hu­man com­mu­nica­tive ges­tures, such as gaze al­terna­t­ion and point­ing, to help them find hid­den food, they found. The birds did­n’t make use of stat­ic cues, in­clud­ing eye gaze or head ori­enta­t­ion, in that con­text.

Un­like most birds, jack­daws’ eyes have a dark pu­pil sur­rounded by a silvery white ar­ea, the iris. The re­search­ers said they be­lieve jack­daws are probably sen­si­tive to hu­man eyes be­cause, as in hu­mans, eyes are an im­por­tant means of com­mu­nica­t­ion for them. The hand-raised birds ex­am­ined in the study may be bet­ter than wild jack­daws at at­tend­ing to hu­man gaze and re­spond­ing to the ges­tures of the peo­ple who have raised them.

The find­ings are par­tic­u­larly nota­ble giv­en that most oth­er spe­cies in­ves­t­i­gated so far, in­clud­ing our clos­est rel­a­tives the chim­pan­zee and “man’s best friend,” the dog, are not par­tic­u­larly sen­si­tive to eye ori­enta­t­ion and eye gaze, von Bay­ern said. Rath­er, she con­tin­ued, chimps and dogs seem to rely on oth­er cues such as head or body ori­enta­t­ion in de­ter­min­ing the look­ing di­rec­tion of oth­ers and do not ap­pear to ap­pre­ci­ate the eyes as the vis­u­al or­gans.

“We may have un­der­es­ti­mated the psy­cho­log­i­cal realms of birds,” von Bay­ern said. “Jack­daws, amongst many oth­er birds, form pair bonds for life and need to closely co­or­di­nate and col­la­bo­rate with their part­ner, which re­quires an ef­fi­cient way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing and sen­si­ti­vity to their part­ner’s per­spec­tive.” The study is re­ported on­line April 2 in the re­search jour­nal Cur­rent Bi­ol­o­gy.