Pigeons might be better with the Monty Hall problem. I first read the Monty Hall problem in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Here’s a summary of the problem from Amazon:

Imagine that you face three doors, behind one of which is a prize. You choose one but do not open it. The host–call him Monty Hall–opens a different door, always choosing one he knows to be empty. Left with two doors, will you do better by sticking with your first choice, or by switching to the other remaining door?

I understand the math behind it, but I still have a hard time believing it, because it’s so much easier to think that “switch or stay” is 50/50. It’s easier to visualize it with charts and to believe it after viewing simulations. The pigeons in the article essentially do the problem over and over and learn to switch every time:

Pigeons likely use empirical probability to solve the Monty Hall problem and appear to do so quite successfully.

“Different species often find very different solutions to the same problems,” Herbranson said. “We humans have ways of tackling probability-based problems that generally work pretty well for us, the Monty Hall dilemma being one notable exception. Pigeons apparently have a different approach, one that just happens to be better suited to the Monty Hall dilemma.”

Empirical probability is a slower, less elegant, brute-force method that can be tricked by the kind of random fluctuations seen in real data, Herbranson said, but it doesn’t employ any mental rules of thumb that can lead to traps such as the Monty Hall problem. In a similar way, the visual systems we depend on to quickly make sense of the world around us can lead to our susceptibility to visual illusions, he added.