Alex, The Brainy Parrot Who Knows About Zero 435
Roland Piquepaille writes "Alex is a 28-year-old grey parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and can count, identify objects, shapes, colors and materials. And now, Alex has grasped the concept of zero, according to World Science. In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this 'zero quantity' by saying the label 'none.' You might think that this is just a parrot trick, but this research about 'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children 'who have trouble learning language and counting skills.' This overview contains other details, references and a picture of Alex counting his colored cubes."
Ah (Score:2, Interesting)
Hubris (Score:5, Interesting)
How I will read it: (Score:1, Interesting)
Smart bird (Score:2, Interesting)
Very Intelligent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's how imporant zero is. without it and infinity, calculus would simply not exist in the form we have today. Pascal used Zero with probability (correct me if I'm wrong on that statement) to "prove" god existed. The Church used Zero to fight heretics. Without Zero, we'd not have concepts defining the absence of something by a number. Zero is versatile, just like Carlin and his spiel on the "F" word. Give the book a read, you'll love it.
ISBN 0-14-029647-6
Bird Brains (Score:3, Interesting)
Intelligence is such a vague term -- but here I mean the ability to adapt to new situations and learn. I had a dog growing up, and I would say (without any scientific study) that the cockatiels are at least as intelligent. I've seen them learn to deal with all sorts of new challenges and become comfortable with them. It is amazing given the tiny size of their brain.
For context, I'm not naive enough to think they understand the meanings of the words we've taught them... I've got them calling out "I'm hungry" whenever they hear us getting their food. They're just associating a sound pattern with an experience -- I'm confident they're not understanding symbolic constructs like "I" and "hungry".
Still, they're impressive little things. I've seen them overcome instinctual fears, like learning that a clear glass table was safe to walk on. I've seen them recognize complex imprecise actions, like knowing that any container we lift to our mouth has something to drink in it (despite the anatomical differences).
I've read somewhere that birds' brains have a different structure than mammals' brains. It may be more size efficient somehow. Anyways, I don't know if this bird really gets "zero", but I don't think it's impossible. Birds can be pretty darn smart. Certainly smarter than I would have thought.
Cheers.
I have seen a video of this parrot (Score:5, Interesting)
The parrot is in this case better then men in understanding language. The researchers can not talk "parrot language", but this bird can talk human language. What would be great for research if they are able to find out if this parrot has a concept of language and can translate some more familiar environment things (like trees instead of keys) and see if that translates to other parrots in the wild.
Ravens put chimps to shame (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hubris (Score:3, Interesting)
Koko the monkey knows sign language, she's so smart, right? No! She only knows it because humans taught it to her. This parrot only knows about zero because humans taught it the concept.
Animals are a lot, but smart in the way (sigh, some) human beings are they are not.
Mr. Bean and the empty tree (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I'm amazed at the avian capability, but surprised at humanity's clunky, late, and worshipful grasp of zero. I read, "Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife, and it took us a hell of a long time to get a simple survival idea to cross from instinct into formalized intellect.
I'm not a behavioral science PhD. Yet, How surprising is it that any animal can recognize zero in respect to color? How many yellow fruits are on that green tree? "None, next tree." How many gray mates are there on the brown branches? "None, next area." We have to think that the loser parrots who hung out at the tree with zero fruit didn't do so well in the evolution crap shoot.
Zero is not so mystically intelligent as we think. Our belly and lungs definitely understand zero. But zero came late to our number systems. Our formalization of zero might well be a mystical leap of intellect, but only history will prove if we are as smart as we think we are. There are a lot of zeros out there we aren't grasping; zero dodos left, zero ozone defense in places, and zero vaccines for modern plagues.
I look forward to the day when Alex and Mr. Bean learn to solve calculus. Then he can exclaim that the limit of e^x as x approaches infinity is infinity. Negative numbers and imaginary numbers and he'll be doing better than most undergrads.
It should be noted Mr. Bean's QWERTY typing is abominable. So his C programming is not as strong as other posts might have suggested.
Re:Symptom, not the cause. (Score:4, Interesting)
It was already clear that Alex was capable of determining the result of permutations that he had never been exposed to previously even if he was familiar with the individual elements.
What is now clear is that Alex can derive vocabulary for permutations that do not match recognized combinations.
The derivation of values for words is something that diferrentiates deduction from association. Alex was able to deduce (presumably from observation) that "none" was a valid word and what it meant.
This makes sense, as 99% of Alex' training IS by example. Two humans run the tests between themselves, Alex observes. One of the humans then carries out similar tests with Alex, to see if he has learned from his observations.
The idea that he may have learned from unintended training sessions is therefore no great surprise. What would be a great surprise is if this is all he has learned. I think the researchers should try to see what else Alex has discovered. Before he starts sending out blackmail notes.
Re:I'm still gonna go with "silly parrot trick" (Score:4, Interesting)
Alex was taught "none" to describe when two blocks of different colors but the same size were presented and Alex was asked "Which color bigger?" In that case, Alex used the word "none" to indicate that they were the same size.
To go from using "none" to indicate that there was no difference to use it to indicate that there were no items of the described characteristics is a small leap for an adult human, but very difficult for small human children and parrots.
Non-human primates can't make that kind of jump. In some ways, Alex, with the brain the size of a walnut, is smarter than an ape with a much bigger brain! Of course, evolution would have selected for a low-weight, highly effective brain in birds because of the weight cost of flying.
Based on what's described in the newest article, I actually suspect that Alex was looking for a word to express just this concept, or something like it. He may have had the concept before he had a word to describe it.
Pepperberg, by the way, knows that she is working in a suspect realm of science. If she cannot document something with experimental evidence that holds up under statistical analysis, she won't say it. That also means that her scientific writing is almost impossible to parse. It's great research, but if you read too much of it, your eyes will bleed.
The best example is the proof that Alex can be ornery. Anyone who owns a parrot knows the #$%^ birds are ornery. But when Alex acted up and proceeded to answer questions wrong, Alex went through every possible answer except the correct one. Pepperberg showed that the probability of that happening by chance was extremely unlikely, and that the only reasonable explanation was that Alex was deliberately answering incorrectly.
One last thing: If Alex is simply answering questions, Alex has an accuracy rate of about 80%. If Alex is competing with another parrot or someone Alex doesn't like, the accuracy goes up to 100%. When attempting to give incorrect answers, again, the accuracy is 100%
There is no doubt in my mind that Alex considers the humans around him to be the inferior species, to be messed with at will. If Pepperberg thinks that as well, she won't say it...until she can prove it conclusively with experiments and statistics.
Re:Ravens put chimps to shame (Score:4, Interesting)
They also have very distinct differences in brain morphology when compared to other birds - not to mention larger and more complex brains. It seems that over time they're specializing for something other birds aren't: more grey matter. It'd be fascinating to see how they develop over the next two or three million years.
Max
Re:biologically speaking... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are to a goat as a parrot is to a chicken. It is actually a very good parallel. The mass of your body is about the same as (some types) of goats, but your brain is bigger. The size of a parrots brains is about the same size as a chickens, but the parrot weighs a lot less.
On the other hand, I've never liked the ratio argument; too many variables get ignored. Still a good analogy though - as good as any other anyway.
Re:More important than "none" (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an instinctive behavior. Their sense of humor is, by human standards, a bit evil.
The classic example of this is a parrot that would bite someone, and then apologize and act all sorrowful. The humans, of course, would attempt to pet the parrot again. The parrot would then bite the huam and laugh like a maniac.
And then apologize, act contrite, and see if he could bite the human again.
One does have to wonder who's testing who's intelligence, especially when you consider that there were people bitten repeatedly by the parrot.
That reminds me. There's some place in Eastern Europe where a bear learned to knock on the door and when the humans answered, push it's way in and grab food and then leave. One human family said that, having fallen for the bear's ruse three times, they now look to see who's knocking before answering the door.
I thought stuff like that was supposed to be "one trial learning"?
"Birdbrain" a much misunderstood concept (Score:3, Interesting)
Until science can accept that intelligence is a sliding scale and comes in degrees, we are unlikely to make much progress, it seems to me. There is no "sudden breakthrough" to consciousness once brains reach a certain size, birds are as conscious as they need to be to be a bird. Likewise cats and dogs.
Here are some amazing feats I've observed in birds: A gull hovering at about 30-40 ft above the ground in a high wind above heavy traffic (the flight control alone this involves is pretty impressive) but the bird is scanning the ground - a noisy field of gravelled tarmac and moving cars - and can pick out among this noisy field a dot of matter on the ground that it knows to be edible. Consider the image processing task this is - we cannot even begin to write a program to do this, let alone "know" that the one dot among millions is edible. The bird will then swoop down among the traffic and pick up the morsel without breaking a sweat.
Australian Magpies in a colony in my garden regularly communicate among themselves with different sounds. These sounds have definite and distinct meanings; they understand them, we do not. One one occasion a particular squawk from the nesting tree brought a sudden urgent rush of Magpies from all over the area flying in to assist - it was obvious from the very direct and unusually effortful flying that this was an emergency. I have no idea what was up, but they did! Not only intelligent but socially organised and with a meaningful language.
I have made many similar observations in passing. When you consider that the human genome is not as large as we thought, and the higher birds' genome is not much smaller, it seems to me that science has a lot of rethinking to do on the subject of brain size and intelligence. And surely the time has come to drop the arrogance of assuming trhe superiority of human intelligence - simple observation will give you plenty of data that refutes this hypothesis. Thus the parrot in the article is really fairly unexceptional - the difference here is that somebody has thought it worthwhile (spuriously in my opinion) to teach it to use its brain in a way it probably doesn't bother to or need to in nature. That its brain is capable of this tends to show me that what birds do with their brains in nature must be equally impressive, and a darn sight more useful for the bird. Contrary to the popular myth, our brains are not 3/4 unused - they are 100% used (well, perhaps not in some of us). And that goes for every living creature too - evolution gives us all exactly the brain we need to survive in the environment we live in.
smart birds (Score:3, Interesting)
Prairie Dog Communication (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.prairiedog.info/Prairie_Dog_Communicat
"Basically, prairie dogs are a universal lunch item. Everybody likes to feed on prairie dogs," says animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University. And the prairie dogs know that. When a predator approaches they emit a series of warning chirps.
Prairie dogs can talk. At least that's the startling conclusion reached by Slobodchikoff. His research flies in the face of conventional scientific thinking on the subject of animal intelligence. He maintains that prairie dogs can convey complex information through a language more sophisticated than that of any animal ever studied. Slobodchikoff has documented more than 100 prairie dog words all revolving around the same subject: predators. From his observation tower on the edge of a prairie dog colony outside Flagstaff, Slobodchikoff operates a directional microphone, a tape recorder and a video camera. From this vantage point, he can spot intruders, such as hawks, cats, dogs, and men and record the alarm calls these potential threats trigger in the prairie dogs.
"Each time we do experiments I'm surprised because each time even I don't think these animals have the capabilities that our experiments show them to have," says Slobodchikoff.
Back at his lab he digitizes his audio field tape into sonograms which show what each alarm call "looks" like, complete with adjectives.
The professor has discovered that prairie dogs use adjectives to differentiate objects. For example, they can describe the color of clothes on a human and whether he is tall or short. They can also describe how fast a man is moving or whether he is carrying a gun. And there's evidence that the animals can remember that specific person for up to two months.
Each prairie dog colony appears to have its own dialect, much like New Yorkers sound different from Southerners. But researchers believe the basic language is the same. That is, a prairie dog from Arizona could talk to a prairie dog from New Mexico.
Re:More important than "none" (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a cat who learned to ring the doorbell when he wanted to come in. Learned behavior, not beyond the realm of what passes for intelligence in cats. It was sort of funny to watch new housemates answer the door, puzzled becuase they didn't see a human standing outside the front door (the cat would be standing on a railing at the edge of the porch, pushing the doorbell with his paw).
But one day the doorbell rang when my cat was inside, and I was just as puzzled because no one was standing outside. It turned out that a stray kitten had rung the doorbell, probably after having seen my cat, Homebrew, do the same thing.
I adopted the kitten temporarily and named him Lucifer. But because I was very allergic to him (the dander of short-haired cats really gets to me -- Homebrew was a long-haired ragdoll) I had to give him away. He ended up with a Christian family who, I suppose, renamed him.
Cats learn from humans and cats learn from cats, but ringing the doorbell of a strange house was something I never expected from a cat. I assume Lucifer saw Homebrew do this, but why did he sense that our house was a safe place for him?
In humans, we would call this a leap of faith.
Cats? Well, I just don't know.
k.