Shigeru Watanabe of Keio University borrowed four birds from the Japanese Society for Racing Pigeons and had them view a series of paintings created by students at a Tokyo elementary school.

The birds were rewarded with food if they pecked at paintings that received a good grade and had also unanimously been considered beautiful by a panel of 10 adults.

They received no reward for pecking at paintings that didn’t quite make the grade. Through the month-long experiment, the pigeons where eventually exposed to paintings they had not seen before.

Writing in the journal Animal Cognition, Watanabe says the winged critics learned to peck at the previously unseen good art twice as often as at the comparable crude paintings — a statistically significant difference.

But the birds were unable to make any differentiation between the paintings when all color was removed or the art was modified to become highly pixelated.

Watanabee also went on to train the birds to tell the difference between watercolor and pastel paintings.

This is not the first time that the psychology professor has dabbled in pigeon perception.

He earned an Ig Nobel prize for one of the more dubious but thought-provoking advances in science in 1995 with his published paper showing pigeons could learn to tell the difference between paintings created by Monet and Picasso.

Image: Barbulat - iStockphoto