Parrots get probability, use stats to make choices
paris — Does Polly want a cracker? That all depends on statistics.
Parrots can learn to choose based on probability, making them the first animal outside of the great ape family that uses statistical modelling in their decision-making process, researchers said on Tuesday.
Wildlife experts taught six kea, a species of large parrot native to New Zealand renowned for their intelligence, to play a variation of a game designed to test their statistical understanding.
The birds — Blofeld, Bruce, Loki, Neo, Plankton and Taz — were trained to associate black tokens with a food reward and orange pegs with none.
What was most surprising is that they can integrate social or physical information into their probabilistic judgements Amalia Bastos,
Research assistant
During early tests, they used their beaks to pick up the black tokens and were given a treat.
The researchers then displayed the pegs in clear jars, with differing ratios of black and orange, picked up one token from each and concealed them in their palms, before offering them to the birds.
The kea preferred tokens from the jars that had a relatively higher proportion of black to orange tokens, showing that they were playing the percentages.
In addition, the kea showed a clear preference towards researchers who had previously demonstrated a “bias” towards picking more black tokens than orange.
“We always knew that they seemed quite intelligent, so we weren’t too surprised to find that they could understand probabilities,” said Amalia Bastos, research assistant at the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology. —