Comments on: Polly-math Parrots Add Sophisticated Reasoning to Their List of Clever Feats

By: Kathi h

Kathi h — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:06:48 +0000

Interesting update on Sugar
When I feed her something creamy like soup or a little yogurt I use a spoon. the other day I was eating ice cream and she removed my husband’s spoon and brought it to me so I could give her some too! Recognizes tool for what it is for… as long as she benefits in some way.

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mark thomas l bob evans coupons — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 05:26:22 +0000

can they understand what we are teaching them?

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home brewing — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:52:44 +0000

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By: k harris

k harris — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 01:07:26 +0000

mine seem to have a very good sense of smell. their cages are in an upstairs room and yet they know when I am cooking something for them as opposed to regular dinner.

mine found corn under a napkin. two other napkins were there with bottle caps ynder them. She went unerringly to the one with the kernel of corn.

lso she seems to be able to count to 3. I read a study that showed crows can keep track of 9 people but not ten! so I of course made up and experiment to see how many coins she could count. 3 was a consistant result.

this same bird has seen us use tools and will go to the toolbox and get a screwdriver and try to use it to remove the screws from outlets. ( which she can abley do with her beak, but where is the fun in that.)

Attention spanwise she has a longer one than my sister’s kids at five and seven.

By: m

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:26:16 +0000

Well well birds are equivalent to a 4 years old in intelligence. Im still waiting a complete chart that shows the intelligence of all common animals relative to humans on a scale of years or achievements.

By: Kaela

Kaela — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:50:08 +0000

@Dust of the Stars:

While parrots have a limited sense of smell, it wouldn’t have helped in this case. They rely almost purely on appearance and/or texture to find foods. Even their sense of taste is limited, though they do use it. I’m assuming this is the reason my conure prefers jalapenos to bell peppers and bananas to strawberries.

By: Susan Brant

Susan Brant — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:19:13 +0000

I believe that parrots rely primarily on sight as they have poor senses of smell and taste. My yellow-nape will not eat anything that is red, no matter what it tastes or smells like. He will try, and usually enjoy, anything else.

By: Susan Brant

Susan Brant — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:14:41 +0000

I believe that parrots rely primarily on sight as they have poor senses of smell and taste.

By: k harris

k harris — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:56:52 +0000

My Mollucan cockatoo Sugar ( age 30) loves tools and hardware. she has many times had one object… explored it with her very sensitive tongue and gone into another room to find a nut ( bolt type) of the correct size to ease over the other object. I couldn’t do it with the precision she uses. also she and her two African gray friends all use words for actions as well as objects. She has been know to use a new sentence with a combination of words she has from something we say often. And she uses the verbs in the right place…. adjectives usually come at the end like Spanish. I have had her since she was 11 months old and she is a member of the family.

Smart doesn’t begin to describe what she and her other bird siblings can do.
I have seen reasoning that astounds me.

By: djanes1

djanes1 — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:14:19 +0000

It should be said that the probability of being biased 16 results in one direction after 210 total trials is about 3%. If you only considered Awisa’s 30 trials, the probability is only ~0.2%. I used a random walk expression with Stirling’s approximation to do those estimations.

By: Calli Arcale

Calli Arcale — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:22:16 +0000

John — they’d have to look different in a way which revealed their contents fairly consistently. Otherwise, if some cups come out of the plant with randomly more UV-fluorescent dye or whatever, it wouldn’t actually help the parrots guess correctly. They might always favor the shinier one, but since the humans can’t tell any difference, there won’t be any relationship to which treat is in which cup, and they wouldn’t score better than chance.

By: quarksparrow

quarksparrow — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:46:22 +0000

@John: It wouldn’t matter. If the birds need to remember which cup contains which item, then obviously there’s already some way for them to tell the cups apart (whether it’s appearance or position). The point is that they need to remember which cup is empty — or, in the case of the second experiment, logically deduce which cup is empty based on which treat was removed.

By: John Lerch

John Lerch — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:12:40 +0000

How about the fact that birds can see in the UV. Maybe the cups aren’t so identical when viewed in UV.

By: Dust of the stars

Dust of the stars — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:12:48 +0000

Could they smell the food?