now, how cute is this? do you have a clever animal? can it perform leaps of logic? tell us about it

Brainy parrot shows it can think like a 4-year-old child

Scientists say bird is the first non-primate to crack hide-the-food logic puzzle

Parrots are capable of logical leaps, according to a new study in which a gray parrot named Awisa used reasoning to figure out where a bit of food was hidden.

The task is one that kids as young as 4 could figure out, but the only other animals that have been shown to use this type of reasoning are great apes. That makes gray parrots the first non-primates to demonstrate such logical smarts, said study researcher Sandra Mikolasch, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna.

"We now know that a gray parrot is able to logically exclude a wrong possibility and instead choose the right one in order to get a reward, which is known as 'inference by exclusion,'" Mikolasch wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Are you smarter than a parrot?
Parrots are no birdbrains. One famous gray parrot, Alex, even understood the concept of "zero," something children don't grasp until they are 3 or 4. Alex, who died in 2007, had a vocabulary of 150 words, which he seemed to use in two-way communication with the researchers who worked with him.

Other animals have also revealed high levels of intelligence. Elephants, for example, know when and how to cooperate. And hyenas are even better than primates at cooperation. Earlier studies had shown that about one out of five chimps and other great apes could use logical reasoning to find hidden food.

To see if some birds could do the same, she and her colleagues trained seven gray parrots to choose between a cup where they'd seen food hidden and a cup without food. Once the parrots learned how to get a treat by choosing the right cup, Mikolasch set up an experiment to test their ability to infer by exclusion.

In one test, she would hide one piece of food (for example, a seed) in one cup and another piece of food (such as a walnut) in another cup while a parrot watched. Next, she'd pick up one cup, show the food to the parrot and re-hide it, or she'd pick up a cup, show the food to the parrot, and put the food in her pocket. The parrot then got to choose a cup. [See pictures of the clever parrots]

In a second experiment, Mikolasch did the same thing, but did so behind an opaque screen. The parrot only saw her hold up a piece of food she had removed, but didn't see her remove it. So the parrots, if they're using their smarts, should know that the cup that once held that type of food is now empty. The logical conclusion, then, is that the other cup still has food in it. If the parrots consistently pick the food-filled cup, it suggests they are making that logical inference.

The researchers controlled the experiment to make sure their results weren't the result of the birds smelling the remaining food.

Learning to reason
Three of the seven parrots proved quite good at picking a cup with food in the experiment in which they'd seen the researcher remove or re-hide the snack. These three parrots — Maja, Moritz and Awisa — chose a cup with food at least 70 percent of the time, significantly

better than chance. But in the experiment in which the food had been removed behind a screen and shown to the parrot later, only Awisa, a 13-year-old female, figured out where the remaining food was, choosing that cup 76 percent of the time.

Awisa may have been successful because she's a parrot "whiz kid," similar to the kid in math class who always scores an A-plus, Mikolasch said. It's also possible that the other birds are capable of logical reasoning, but something about the test conditions distracted or confused them.

The fact that not all the birds figured it out suggests that logical reasoning is no easy task for them, much as four out of five great apes had trouble with the same experiment. In an earlier study, Mikolasch said, 18 out of 20 4-year-olds were capable of making the same logical leap as Awisa.

Intriguingly, the researchers found, Awisa got better at guessing the right cup in the experiment where she didn't see the food removed, but not in the experiment in which she did. That suggests that the parrot "learned to reason" about what the researcher was doing behind the screen, Mikolasch wrote.

"I think it is one more step to show the cognitive abilities of birds and animals in general," she said. "More attention should be paid to their needs. … As I tested the gray parrots in a parrot rescue center, I know in what bad conditions some of them had to live for several years before they were rescued."

The study is detailed Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...e-science/

Proof that birds are superior living beings. They should rule the world. If only ...

JoeTyler said:

Proof that birds are superior living beings. They should rule the world. If only ...

i hereby cast my vote for Joe Tyler, ORG Wiseman

BklynBabe said:

Sheesh, we spend money to study the obvious! Do you see animals running themselves ragged, stressing to pay rent and buy food to survive? Damn, a good portion of them have figured out how to live rent free and make humans provide their food. Obviously they are smarter lol... They probably laugh their asses off while we study them.

my birds use a system of rewards and punishment on me when i am late bringing their snacks, they bite my nose. just a teensy nip. then, when i bring the snacks they nip me again, to remind me not to be late. i am such a fast learner they had me trained in three days.

XxAxX said:

JoeTyler said:

Proof that birds are superior living beings. They should rule the world. If only ...

i hereby cast my vote for Joe Tyler, ORG Wiseman

somestimes I dream I transform into a bird

BklynBabe said:

Sheesh, we spend money to study the obvious! Do you see animals running themselves ragged, stressing to pay rent and buy food to survive? Damn, a good portion of them have figured out how to live rent free and make humans provide their food. Obviously they are smarter lol... They probably laugh their asses off while we study them.

Good point.

JoeTyler said:

XxAxX said:

i hereby cast my vote for Joe Tyler, ORG Wiseman

somestimes I dream I transform into a bird

i hope to grow my own set of feathers one day

I have 3 parrots and a cat, and yes they are intelligent.

One of my parrot started to learn colors, he can say some sentences (at the right moment), he has a kind of plastic tower where I put food and he has to pull things to take the food out, and he does that very quickly...

It is proven parrots have intelligence of a 3 year old kid (depending on the parrot species of course, some get to 4-5 years old mental age)

wow that's smarter than my ex

birds are far more intelligent than people give them credit for. the common crow is a prime example of a long-underrated animal. crows have gained a bad reputation over the years for hanging around on human battlefields, eating the dead. however, it's not like the crows actually killed the humans, other humans did that.

so it makes no sense to therefore condemn crows as being 'evil' or 'satanic' the way some religious folklore and literature has unfortunately done.

from today's headlines:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...e-science/

Hitchcockian crows gossip about mean humans

Even after a year, a slighted crow may gang up with buddies to 'scold' you

The common crow knows when you're out to get him — and he's likely to teach his friends and family to watch out for you, a new study finds.

In results that can only be described as Hitchcockian, researchers in Seattle who trapped and banded crows for five years found that those birds don't forget a face. Even after going for a year without seeing the threatening human, the crows would scold the person on sight, cackling, swooping and dive-bombing in mobs of 30 or more.

"Most of the birds that are scolding us are not the ones we captured," said study researcher John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and an occasional victim of crow attacks. "It's likely that they're learning from their parents and their peers that this dangerous person is still out there."

Holding a grudge
Crows are savvy birds: They not only use tools, but can use common sense to come up with ways to make unfamiliar tools work. They also hold a grudge. A study published in May in the journal Animal Cognition found that crows' close relatives, magpies, recognize researcher's faces regardless of what the scientists wear. And just this month, police in Everett, Wash., about 25 miles north of Seattle, found themselves on the wrong side of a flock (or "murder") of crows. The birds dive-bombed the officers as they walked across their station's parking lot. State Department of Fish and Wildlife officials blamed fledgling season, when adult birds become extremely protective of the young that are just leaving the nest. ("Umbrellas may be used as a defense tactic" against the crows, reported the Everett Herald newspaper.)

Marzluff and his colleagues similarly noticed that when they trapped and banded crows for research, mobs of angry birds would fly overhead, scolding them. When the researchers returned to the area later, the birds immediately recognized them and started scolding.

"The more we messed with them, the more we thought they were really paying attention to us," Marzluff told LiveScience.

The researchers launched a five-year study to find out how much data their research subjects had been gathering on them. To ensure that crows were responding to their faces and not to their clothes, binoculars or some other ornithologist cue, the scientists wore different masks while trapping birds at each site. The masks included a caveman, Dick Cheney and several custom-made realistic faces.

The birds quickly learned that the masked bird-trapper was bad news and proceeded to scold the mask-wearer anytime they saw him or her. But over the years, the researchers found, the mobbing became more and more widespread. In February, Marzluff said, he ventured out of his office in a mask he'd worn five years earlier while trapping seven birds.

"I got about 50 meters [165 feet] out of my office and I had about 50 birds on me, scolding me," he said. "I hadn't worn that mask on campus for a year."

Bird brains
It was clear the birds that had never seen the trapping were joining the angry murders. The question, Marzluff said, was whether those birds were simply following the lead of a single bird that had seen the trapping, or had learned from their flockmates that this was a face to watch out for.

To find out, the researchers tested a "dangerous" mask and a neutral mask on fledgling crows while their parents were in the nest and also while their parents were away. They found that the presence of a grudge-holding leader wasn't necessary: If the baby birds had ever seen their parents scold the mask, they started scolding it even when mom and dad weren't around.

"A lot of laboratory studies will show that [crows] can learn by observation, but not in the field," Marzluff said. "That combination of learning firsthand and learning through these observations, that's what's unique about our study."

The researchers reported their results June 28 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They are now using brain-scanning techniques on captured birds to find out what's happening in the crows' brains when they see a dangerous face.

You can follow LiveSciencesenior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

[Edited 6/29/11 5:56am]

^Interesting stuff. I wonder if the original bird was still around after five years to remember their faces, or how else would the birds know who he was.