They’re all squawk: parrots have the human touch but not the perception

An endangered parrot found only in New Zealand has shown it can be taught to use a touchscreen but has trouble telling virtual and real worlds apart.

The study, which involved the kea parrot, was carried out by University of Auckland PhD student Amalia Bastos to get a better insight into how the birds responded to virtual stimuli.

“Kea, Nestor notabilis, present an excellent model species to assess whether parrots, and potentially other species, might perceive the real and virtual worlds as continuous,” Bastos wrote in the Biology Letters journal.

Bastos and her colleagues set out to show that virtual stimuli could be powerful tools for testing the cognition of non-human animal species.

Working from the basis that the birds could recognise and discriminate between objects that they had seen in photographs and on touchscreens, the researchers hypothesised that the birds would “display ape-like performances in a range of cognitive tasks”.

The subjects were six male kea kept in captivity at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island.

After being taught to operate touchscreens, the birds were given tasks that were either physical, virtual or a mixture of both to receive a reward. 

“In all trials, subjects indicated their choice by touching a box with their beak or tongue and were rewarded for selecting the correct box,” Bastos wrote.

These results are in clear contrast to those from 19-month-old infants, who differentiate between the real and virtual worlds.

—  University of Auckland PhD student Amalia Bastos

In a follow-up experiment the researchers pitted real and virtual stimuli directly against each other to distinguish between three hypotheses to explain the parrots’ performances in the first experiment.

The researchers needed to ensure that the parrots were not following an associative rule for selecting the correct box, but were rather “naive realists” that believed that the real box in the crossover condition would contain the virtual token apparently deposited into it.

“None of the subjects demonstrated a preference for either stimulus type ... suggesting that they may have perceived both as equivalent and judged both boxes as equally likely to contain a rewarding spherical token,” Bastos wrote.

The study concluded that the parrots did behave as “naive realists” and were unable to tell virtual and real worlds apart, placing them at odds with 19-month-old babies who were the subjects of a previous study on cognition.

“These results are in clear contrast to those from 19-month-old infants, who differentiate between the real and virtual worlds,” Bastos wrote.

Bastos hoped the research would increase the success of captive breeding programmes for releasing the birds into the wild.

Kea parrots in captivity need constant stimulation in order to stay mentally healthy, Bastos told The Guardian, adding that their keepers needed to entertain them.

Using virtual stimulation could remove the necessity for using humans which would improve the chances of the birds surviving after being released into the wild.

The kea was slaughtered by farmers for more than a century in retaliation for attacking sheep, New Zealand Geographic reported.

The parrot is famous for mischievous behaviour, the magazine added, citing an example of one bird that stole nails from a carpenter brought in to fix a flood-damaged hiker’s hut on the famous Milford Track.

“Weeks later, after the new hut had been completed, the purloined nails were discovered. They had been neatly laid in the gutters of an outbuilding’s iron roof, sorted according to size,” the magazine said.