Parrots not intelligent, huh ?

Wai Jia: The Kung Fu Forum Kung Fu Forum
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Here’s a video of the parrot Alex (Alex is the smart parrot mentioned in the other thread) in action, hosted on my site :
http://hem.passagen.se/nebol/temp/alextheparrot.mov

Check it out, it’s great !!

>parrots cant do arithmetic man.
>
>they mimick sounds of their environment, they
>cannot logically put together sentences and the
>like. If a parrot does seem to have these
>qualities, it is probably some sort of trick the
>trainer has accomplished.

Yeah, they mimick sounds if that’s what you teach them! People have always thought parrot’s were just mimickers, so that’s how they’ve been trained. Stupid people standing in front of the carrot page all day saying “Hello, how are you? My name is Polly!”. Of course they’ll just learn to mimick.

Instead, do like the people at the Alex Foundation. (Alex is the parrot mentioned earlier), and associate words with actions, objects etc.
Check the website out, there’s a lot of info that may change your opinion about these birds.

This parrot can be shown two similar objects and answer questions like “What is different?” (could be color, material, size, shape, nothing etc) “What is same?”.

He even makes jokes, when he’s it that mood.
"He may refuse to answer questions, shouting "No!“and turning his back. He may repeat the wrong answer stubbornly or demand some other item: “Want corn!” The students tell, too, of one test in which Alex was asked to name, from six objects on a tray, the one that was green. Alex named the other five – everything but the desired answer – and then tipped the tray onto the floor”

“This research suggests that parrots, like chimps and dolphins, are capable of mastering complex intellectual concepts that children cannot handle until age 5.”

“All of the tests we’ve done with dolphins and great apes to investigate their intelligence, we’ve done with Alex,‘’ Pepperberg said. ``He scored as well as they did in many of them, better in some.”

Now, these people are scientists who have been working with Alex for 21 years, (yeah these animals grow really old). They are currently teaching him to read.

Don’t think you know everything about the world. It just hinders progression.

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More about Alex …

Theodore Barber, a psychologist who heads the Research Institute for
Interdisciplinary Science in Ashland, Mass., and wrote the 1993 book
‘‘The Human Nature of Birds,’’ is even more emphatic about bird
consciousness. ‘‘They’re not robots or birdbrains,’’ he said in an
interview last week.

After studying the published scientific research on birds’ abilities,
he said, ‘‘I came to the conclusion that they’re aware, they’re
intelligent, they know what they’re doing.’’

In a recent paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Pepperberg
reported that young parrots develop certain mental abilities much like
human children do. She demonstrated that Griffin, her youngest parrot,
went through the same six stages that children do (and did so even
faster) in developing a sense that objects still exist when they are
hidden from view - what psychologist Jean Piaget called ‘‘object
permanence’’ in his research with human children.

Piaget showed that the ability to locate an object that is seen and
then hidden is not an innate human ability, but is learned during the
first two years of life. In the sixth stage, the experimenter hides an
object inside a box (or a hand), hides the box under a cover, and then
removes the box and shows it to be empty. The child determines that
the object must now be under the cover - and so does the parrot.

That’s especially interesting because the same test has been tried on
a wide variety of animals. Most never made it to stage six: Monkeys,
cats, doves, chickens, and hamsters never figured it out. Only great
apes, parrots, and possibly dogs passed the test. And the dogs did not
get as far as Griffin did. They failed the most sophisticated test, a
variant of the old shell game with an object placed under one of three
covers that are then moved around.

In the shell-game test, Pepperberg wrote in her analysis, Griffin
‘‘never hesitated and seemed to track the experimenter’s hand very
closely,’’ and he almost always knew where the object was. Alex, too,
passed the test easily. That suggests, Pepperberg wrote, that ‘‘gray
parrots, unlike dogs and cats but like humans and great apes, develop
a robust sense of object permanence.’’

According to Piaget, such abilities reflect a capacity to form a
mental picture of an object, and to understand that its existence
continues independent of the observer - fairly sophisticated abstract
reasoning.

But nobody has yet determined by rigorous scientific tests whether
parrots, or any other species, develop more advanced concepts, such as
a sense of self, or an ability to remember past events or look ahead
to future events beyond the immediate fulfillment of simple requests.

‘‘We have very little firm information’’ about such mental abilities,
biologist Griffin said. But those questions may eventually be
answered: Research by Pepperberg and the handful of experimenters who
are studying communication with apes and with dolphins are ‘‘opening
up a whole area where we used to think there was just nothing there.’’

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hush

All i wanted was some RICE CAKES! Now? WE MUST BATTLE.