Are parrots naive realists? Kea behave as if the real and virtual worlds are continuous

Abstract

Human psychology and animal cognition have increasingly used virtual stimuli to test cognitive abilities, with the expectation that participants are ‘naive realists’, that is, that they perceive virtual environments as both equivalent and continuous with real-life equivalents. However, there have been no attempts to investigate whether nonhuman subjects in fact behave as if physical processes in the virtual and real worlds are continuous. As kea parrots have previously shown the ability to transfer knowledge between real stimuli and both images on paper and images on touchscreens, here we test whether kea behave as naive realists and so expect physical processes to be continuous between the physical and virtual worlds. We find that, unlike infants, kea do not discriminate between these two contexts, and that they do not exhibit a preference for either. Our findings therefore validate the use of virtual stimuli as a powerful tool for testing the cognition of nonhuman animal species.

Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update

“…Previous studies have shown that kea can transfer learned discriminations from object to picture and vice versa (Wein et al 2015 ), but find it easier to discriminate between real than digital objects in a reversal-learning task (O’Hara et al 2015b ). A recent study investigated whether kea can perceive the real and virtual world as continuous, i.e., that a virtually displayed process can have a real physical impact (Bastos et al 2021c ). Kea could observe a seesaw tilting to one side, which resulted in a token rolling off the seesaw and falling into one of two containers.…”

“…Half of the kea avoided virtual tokens when it seemed to touch but not fall into a real box (proximity control). The authors argued that this suggests that kea perceive virtual environments as equivalent and continuous with the physical world (Bastos et al 2021c ).…”

“…However, the species recently tested in the condition with crossed strings, failed, which is in line with most – but not all – previously tested species. Studies on the use of object properties and physical entities show for example that some parrots form mental templates of some object properties (Laumer et al 2021a ), are sensitive to liquid overconservation (Cornero et al 2020 ), discriminate based on weight (P. J. Lambert et al 2021 ), and may perceive the virtual and real world as a continuum (Bastos et al 2021c ). Tool use studies in recent years included new coincidental observations that were further thoroughly examined (O’Hara and Mioduszewska et al 2021 ; Bastos et al 2021a ).…”