Parrots No Birdbrains, Says MIT Professor

Abstract

' ' p oily want a cracker?" may yield to "Polly

want computer time?" if Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Irene Pepperberg has her way.

Dr. Pepperberg is already wellknown in avian circles as the trainer of Alex the African grey parrot Psittacus erithacus. The celebrated Alex doesn't just "parrot" human English - he can recognize and name nearly 100 different objects, including color, texture and quantity. Unprompted, he will identify the color of a human visitor's clothes, ask for various treats or even to go to another room. He even improvises - referring to an apple as a "banerry," an apparent combination of banana and cherry.

"Up to this point, Alex has performed as well as the chimps or dolphins," says Dr. Pepperberg of the psittacine celebrity's communicative ability.

Next up, the professor even sees potential for Alex to read, and has been experimenting with refrigerator magnet letters.

Dr. Pepperberg's findings have

 

been applied to the teaching of developmentally disabled children, with an astonishing degree of success.

Alex remains at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Pepperberg did her groundbreaking work on avian communication.

Currently, Irene Pepperberg is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab. She returns to Arizona one week out of each month, as she continues in New England with her African grey research.

Would you believe - a Web Browser for birds? As parrot owners know, the birds are very social and crave attention. Left alone during the day, they often develop such bad habits as feather picking and excessive screaming. "We're developing computer-based gadgets to enhance the parrot/human interaction. We're hoping they will respond to video clips on a liquid crystal display and this will be a positive thing for them," explains Dr. Pepperberg. Some potential reward images may be the birds' owners or other parrots in the wild. Negative behavior may yield such images as a menacing osprey - or perhaps the fun new toy, the computer, will simply shut itself off.

Dr. Pepperberg has become greatly concerned with the status of parrots in the wild. "My students in Cameroon

 

were threatened by poachers and this was in a reserve. The problem is that there's not enough money to police the reserve," she points out. Fully one quarter of parrot species are in trouble, with poaching and habitat loss as leading culprits.

"One of the reasons we do our work is to make the public more aware of the intelligence of these creatures. It's sad but true, the more intelligent the creature, the more likely it is that the general public will be interested in the general conservation of that species," she continues.

To this end, one of her MIT projects is developing a lightweight radio tracking device for wild parrots. "Radio collars don't work, they chew them off," the doctor explains.

Conventional wisdom holds that apes and dolphins have the most potential for advanced communication. "Nobody was looking at birds and it was clear from the anecdotal literature that something was going on there," reasoned Professor Pepperberg. Still, past tests on talking birds proved inconclusive at best. One researcher's birds mastered imitating the sound of a tape recorder going on and off but not much else! Dr. Pepperberg thought that maybe past results had "less to do with the intelligence of birds than the intelligence of the researchers doing the tests."

 

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References

For more information on Alex and Dr. Irene Pepperberg, including video clip, visit: http://www.cages.org/research/ pepperberg/index.html

Thanks to New Hampshire Avicultural Society for inviting George Sommers to cover and exclusively interview Dr. Irene Pepperberg at a Nashua, NH presentation. For more information on the New Hampshire Avicultural Society, e-mail

parrotplay@prodigy.net

Freelance writer George Sommers has owned a Goffin's cockatoo for eleven years. Visit:

http://members.aol.com/ georgesommers/index.html ~