Parrots Are Only The Second Kind of Animal We've Found That Can Grasp Probabilities
Up until now, only human beings and other great apes have demonstrated an ability to understand probabilities – being able to weigh up the odds based on the available data, or statistical inference, as it's formally called. Now, for the first time, a parrot species has demonstrated this skill.
Tests on six kea (Nestor notabilis) parrots have shown they were able to understand and act on probabilities in a variety of scenarios that have previously been tested on humans and apes.
The findings have some wide-reaching implications – from understanding more about how the minds of non-primates might work, to producing more realistic and detailed artificial intelligence systems of our own.
In particular, the result sheds some light on whether human and non-human brains tend to develop specific sections for specific tasks (domain-specific), or adapt the same sort of cognitive processes for whatever task is required (domain-general).
"Our results show that kea exhibit three signatures of statistical inference, and therefore can integrate knowledge across different cognitive domains to flexibly adjust their predictions of sampling events," the researchers write in their newly published study.
"This result provides evidence that true statistical inference is found outside of the great apes, and that aspects of domain-general thinking can convergently evolve in brains with a highly different structure from primates."
The study played out over three experiments. Six kea – Blofeld, Bruce, Loki, Neo, Plankton and Taz – were first trained to associate the colour black with a reward, and the colour orange with no reward.
....MOREAfter filling up transparent jars with differing levels of black and orange tokens, the researchers would pick tokens from one or two jars in front of the parrot, conceling the token colour and letting the parrots make a choice from a closed hand.....
[insert Norwegian Blue actuary joke]
On the other hand (so to speak) if you get a chance to play three-card monte with this guy, bet large:
