我们对大脑如何做决策的许多认知，都来自研究猴子观看光点的实验。在一种被称为随机点运动任务的实验中，一团闪烁的微点会向某个方向微弱地漂移，而受试动物需要判断这些光点是否在移动，以及移动的方向。该任务表明，在灵长类动物的新皮层中，神经元会随时间积累视觉证据，其放电率不断上升，直到跨越一个阈值，动物随即做出决策。但鸟类大脑没有新皮层，因此它们如何做出类似决策并不明显。
Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. in a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the subject tries to determine whether—and in which direction— it’s moving. The task has shown that in the primate neocortex, neurons gather visual evidence over time, with their firing rates climbing until they cross a threshold, when the animal commits to a decision. But avian brains that don’t have a neocortex, so it wasn’t obvious how they made similar decisions. “This was the big question,” said Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen.
“这是个大问题，”图宾根大学的神经生物学家安德烈亚斯·尼德说，“结构不同的鸟类大脑会如何编码决策？”
“How [would] a differently organized avian brain encode decisions?”