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Pigeon Neural Populations Encoded Specific Movements Rather Than Simply Identifying Other Pigeons

Two feral rock pigeons facing each other during courtship
Research · Physiology

Neural populations in the pigeon brain responded to specific features of another pigeon’s movements rather than simply signalling whether a viewed stimulus was a pigeon, according to a study published on 26 February 2026. Researchers recorded individual nerve cells in three brain regions while pigeons (Columba livia) watched videos of other pigeons and control shapes.

The study used 11 pigeons. The head-fixed and body-restrained birds viewed videos showing four kinds of behaviour—courtship, feeding, flight and walking—while researchers recorded single-unit activity in the visual Wulst, the mesopallium ventrolaterale (MVL) and the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL). These regions contribute to different aspects of visual processing and cognition.

Experimental setup and visual stimuli used in the pigeon neural-recording study
Experimental setup and visual stimuli used in the study. Figure 1 from Santos Silva et al. (2026), Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, CC BY 4.0.

Single neurons did not simply code “pigeon”

Visually responsive neurons were found in all three regions, but the researchers did not find a categorical separation in which individual neurons consistently distinguished videos of pigeons from the control stimuli.

Population-level analyses in the two more directly visual regions, MVL and the visual Wulst, instead revealed brief changes in neural activity that coincided with particular movement features. Responses were associated with bowing, wing-flapping and head-bobbing, indicating that groups of neurons encoded components of the observed behaviour rather than maintaining a simple “conspecific” category signal.

Visual pathways differed in how they combined information

Some visually responsive neurons were also influenced by sound. These sound-modulated visual cells were significantly more common in MVL than in the visual Wulst. The authors interpret this as a sign that visual and auditory information may be combined earlier than previously recognised in the tectofugal pathway, one of the major visual pathways in the bird brain. They also caution that sound-modulated cells made up only a small part of the recorded population, so this result needs further testing.

During passive viewing, NCL did not show the same clear modulation by visual features as the two more directly visual regions. The authors therefore suggest that NCL was less involved in automatic analysis of these visual details under the conditions tested.

Sources and image credit

  1. Santos Silva, S., Bühn, D., Hall, P., Clark, W., Rose, J., & Colombo, M. (2026). Single neuron responses in NCL, MVL, and Wulst during the observation of videos of conspecifics support population feature coding. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 20, 1736261. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1736261Primary peer-reviewed open-access article published 26 February 2026 under CC BY 4.0. Eleven pigeons viewed videos of conspecifics and control shapes while single-unit activity was recorded in visual Wulst, MVL and NCL. Population analyses identified responses associated with specific movement features rather than a simple conspecific-versus-control category signal.

Image: Rhododendrites — courting feral rock pigeons (Columba livia) in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, photographed 17 April 2021; representative species image, not birds from the laboratory study. Source: Wikimedia Commons. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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