Who’s a clever bird — now? A brief history of parrot cognition

Abstract

Parrots are renowned for their intelligence and ability to imitate human speech ever since they have been kept as pets. Despite of impressive pioneering work on the cognitive abilities of parrots, research on parrot cognition has only recently gained momentum, probably given the new wave of interest in possible convergent evolution of complex cognition within the vertebrates. Together with corvids, they often parallel primates if not great apes in cognitive performance and have become important model systems to study the evolution of cognition. We briefly review the history of parrot cognition within the field of comparative cognition and introduce some of the laboratories that have contributed to this special issue as well as the studies they present.

Kea show three signatures of domain-general statistical inference

“…Much work in this field over the past 15 years has focused on corvids, which, as a group, have produced their most impressive problem-solving performances predominantly on domain-specific, ecologically relevant tasks, such as those involving caching or tool use [51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60] . Parrots have only recently become the focus of a sustained, global research effort 61 . Behaviour suggestive of more domain-general processes have emerged in both groups from studies examining the ability of non-tool users to solve tool problems 48,49,[62][63][64][65][66] .…”

Play behaviour, not tool using, relates to brain mass in a sample of birds

“…The emphasis in this paper, though, has been to examine the link between a number of behavioural variables and the dynamics of these variables that might contribute to brain mass and its likely presence of cognitive abilities, already in evidence for a number of large-brained birds such as cockatoos and parrots 116 , keas 117 and corvids 118 . All of the species tested in great detail for their cognitive abilities, one might add, are either extant birds of the southern hemisphere with Gondwanan origins or, as in corvids, have distant Gondwanan heritage.…”

Macphail’s Null Hypothesis of Vertebrate Intelligence: Insights From Avian Cognition

“…Evidence for convergent evolution in the cognitive abilities of great apes, corvids, and parrots also suggests that quantitative differences in intelligence do exist across species, and that these differences relate to their ecology ( Emery, 2004 ; Clayton, 2012 ; Emery et al, 2012 ; Güntürkün and Bugnyar, 2016 ; Auersperg and von Bayern, 2019 ). One clear prediction that the contextual variable argument makes is that differences in methodology should become more difficult to control for and, therefore, have a greater impact on task performance, the further apart two species are phylogenetically.…”

“…However, the great apes, parrots, and corvids, despite being evolutionarily distant taxa, converge in several of their cognitive abilities ( Emery, 2004 , 2006 ; Emery and Clayton, 2004 ; Seed et al, 2009 ; Clayton, 2012 ; Emery et al, 2012 ; Güntürkün and Bugnyar, 2016 ; Auersperg and von Bayern, 2019 ). The Piagetian framework for object permanence describes different stages of development for this ability, which requires an individual to understand that an object continues to exist when hidden within a container ( Piaget, 1954 ).…”