Re: Bird Brains

[Betty Cunningham <bettyc@flyinggoat.com>]

I've just heard about today of a study (not yet published) with pigeons
where the pigeons are trained to recognise music snippets by specific
composers and the study has found these pigeons can furthermore identify
OTHER WORKS by the same composers simply by ear.

Hell, I can't even do that.

-Betty Cunningham

Sara Burch wrote:
> 
> >  I just read an article in Discover about parrots who (African Grays) who do
> > not mimik speach, they understand what they are saying and are capable of
> > thinking in the abstract.  They recognize that reflections in a mirror 
> > imitate
> > reality, for instance (a skill which humans do not have until age two).  
> > They
> > can recognize patterns and make predictions of future events based on the
> > patterns (red circle, red square, red triange, what color will the next 
> > shape
> > be?)  All this they do with a little bird brain, _much_ smaller in relation 
> > to
> > body mass than a monkey's.  Is it possible that avian brains are wired to 
> > make a
> > more efficiant use of space than mammalian brains are?  Also, what does 
> > this say
> > about dinosaurian brains?
> >
> > Dan
> 
> For anyone who's interested in how the study went:
> 
>         There is a current research project going on with Alex, an
> African Grey
> parrot. He is 23 years old. Irene Pepperberg, the scientist working with
> Alex, picked an African Grey at random. The Alex was 1 year old when she
> bought him from a pet store in Chicago. He had no previous language
> training, and the first thing he did was identify objects like paper,
> wood and rawhide, and label several colors and shapes. Then he learned
> to classify objects by shape, color or material by answering questions.
> Then he displayed object permanence: when an object is hidden, he
> searches for it. Very young children and most animals do not have that
> ability, when an object is removed from view they forget about it. After
> that he learned numerical quantity. He wasn't counting but he would tell
> if there was a lot of an object or a little. Then he could tell
> same/different, and could say what was the same or different about 2
> objects. He also understood absence of information. When asked what was
> different about 2 identical objects, he answers "none". Then he answered
> multi-dimensional questions on a subject, like "What color is the key?"
> Then, Irene discovers that Alex practices in the night what he learned
> in the day. He then learned actual numerical quantity, counting objects.
> Currently, Alex is learning he ABC's. There have been some of her
> findings published, and in January 2000 Dr. Pepperberg is publishing a
> book called the Alex Studies, a compilation of 20 years of research.
>         I don't know how this relates to dinosaur minds, if it does, but that
> is basic info.
> 
> Sara
> sara@burch.net

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