Yes, at least for simple visual choices. In a study published in Science in October 2026, carrion crows decided which way a pattern of dots was moving in about 235 milliseconds on average, roughly twice as fast as humans and monkeys doing the same kind of task.
Researchers Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder at the University of Tübingen in Germany trained two carrion crows to watch moving dots on a touchscreen and peck a target on the left or right to show the main direction. The birds stayed accurate while working fast: with clear signals they were right nearly 100% of the time, and they still beat chance when the motion was hard to see. Recordings from the nidopallium caudolaterale, a bird brain region comparable to the human prefrontal cortex, showed neuron signals for different directions starting to separate about 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared. Activity then built up until it reached a threshold and the crow responded, the same basic pattern seen in primates. Birds lack a layered cortex, so the study suggests very different brains can make decisions the same way. Nieder links the speed to the fast vision birds need for flight and foraging.
Source: Phys.org (University of Tübingen), Crows make decisions twice as fast as humans and monkeys
Image: Carrion crow, Ian Kirk, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.