animal minds: clever parrots (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 28, 2018, 18:01 (2058 days ago) @ David Turell

In a delayed gratification study parrots are as sharp as chimps:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/who-s-a-clever-bird-parrots-play-the-odds-when-makin...

"When it comes to delaying gratification for greater reward, parrots compare well with chimpanzees and out-perform capuchin monkeys, a new study reveals.

"Delayed gratification experiments were famously performed on children in the 1980s by Walter Mischel – the “marshmallow tests”. Will a child take one marshmallow now, or wait and have two marshmallows as a reward for delaying the joy of eating that one marshmallow straight away?

"Researchers in cognitive science call this economic decision-making. The process is cognitively challenging, because it involves a complex and thorough assessment of the current situation, together with an understanding of future reward as a result of controlling one’s impulses.

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"The use of symbolic tokens instead of actual food rewards to test economic decision-making overcomes this issue, and has been used previously with chimps (Pan troglodytes) and capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). This research, published in the journal Nature, is the first to use the token method with parrots.

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" This new study looks at the Psittacoidea family of parrots, distantly related to the cockatoos, and represented by specialist fruit foragers, the great green macaw (Ara ambiguuus) and blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis), as well as generalist foragers, the blue-headed macaw (Primolius couloni) and African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus).

"When provided with a choice between a food item and a token that could be exchanged for more preferred food, all four species inhibited their impulsive reactions and selected the token significantly more often than chance, thus maximising their pay-off. These results are comparable to those seen in testing with chimpanzees, and surpassed the results of testing with capuchin monkeys.

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"Parrots using tokens and trading for treats in a controlled laboratory situation tell us a lot about their cognitive abilities, but how does this translate to their lives in the wild?
“Given that wild parrots are so difficult to track, to date we know little about the ecological challenges most parrots encounter in their habitats in the wild, such as deciding where to go and how long to stay in a given feeding site,” says von Bayern.

“'However, in our experimental setting we have found that they are capable of making surprisingly subtle decisions to maximise their payoff while minimising their effort. This is a fascinating indication that such decisions may matter greatly in their natural environment.'”

Comment: At this level of cognitive function it is not the size of the brain that counts.