Art critics of the world, look out – a pigeon might just be coming for your job. Well, if you’re in the business of deciding if a child’s artwork is good or bad at least, because that’s exactly what one scientist trained a bunch of pigeons to do.

Watanabe Shigeru, a Professor Emeritus in psychology at Keiō University, had previously shown that pigeons were able to tell the difference between paintings by Monet and Picasso; unsurprisingly, his team won an Ig Nobel Prize for this research back in 1995.

But what if pigeons were capable of going a step beyond discriminating between different painting styles? Could they tell the difference between “good” and “bad” paintings? With four pigeons, some food, and a bunch of children’s artwork photographed and uploaded to a computer, Watanabe set to finding out.

As deemed by a teacher, and then a group of 10 adult observers, 15 watercolor and pastel paintings by elementary schoolchildren were placed in the “good” set, and another 15 in the “bad” set.

Then began the training; the pigeons were shown the paintings on a computer screen and were rewarded with food if they pecked in response to a “good” painting. They didn’t receive a reward if they pecked at a “bad” one.

After an average of 22.5 sessions, all four pigeons were able to discriminate between a “good” and a “bad” painting. But surely they were just memorizing which pictures belong to which set, right? It seems not.

Watanabe followed up with other experiments, first by showing the pigeons pictures that they had never seen before – and the birds successfully pecked at those in the “good” group more often than the “bad” ones. The same thing happened when they were shown paintings that had been reduced in size.

The next step was to figure out what it was about the paintings that the pigeons were using to make the decision to peck or not. What Watanabe found “did not confirm which cues pigeons used for their discrimination of beauty,” the psychologist wrote, but when shown greyscale and mosaic versions of the paintings, the pigeons were less able to distinguish between the “good” and the “bad”. This, it’s suggested, might mean they use color and shape cues in their decision-making.

"Artistic endeavors have been long thought to be limited to humans, but this experiment shows that, with training, pigeons are capable of distinguishing between ‘good' and ‘bad' paintings,” said Watanabe in a statement. 

“This research does not deal with advanced artistic judgments, but it shows that pigeons are able to acquire the ability to judge beauty similar to that of humans."

No word on whether the pigeons’ feedback was given to the children.

The study is published in Animal Cognition.