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Alex, The Brainy Parrot Who Knows About Zero
Roland Piquepaille writes "Alex is a 28-year-old grey parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and can count, identify objects, shapes, colors and materials. And now, Alex has grasped the concept of zero, according to World Science. In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this 'zero quantity' by saying the label 'none.' You might think that this is just a parrot trick, but this research about 'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children 'who have trouble learning language and counting skills.' This overview contains other details, references and a picture of Alex counting his colored cubes."
zeroth post!
This just goes how much we underestimate animals and overvalue ourselves. We'd like to believe that the evolution gap between us and every other species is too broad to be even fathomed, but it's simply not true. I know some people will reply and say that we all know that we came from apes, but I'm not talking about what we know, but how we act. We treat animals like they don't have emotions and that they aren't capable of the same types of understanding as us. In the future I imagine we are going to see that animals can do a lot of things we never though and are even better than us in some areas of intellect.
NJ Local Music Scene
Alex The Brainy Parrot says:
Roland Piquepaaaaaaaille went from <none> to $500 in three minutes.
Alex is a 28-year-old grey parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and can count, identify objects, shapes, colors and materials. And now, Alex has grasped the concept of zero, according to World Science. In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this "zero quantity" by saying "none." You might think that this is just a parrot trick, but this research about 'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children "who have trouble learning language and counting skills." Read more...
One of the really interesting things about Alex is that it had learned in the past that "none" meant a lack of information. And without any training, when Alex was asked to say how many green or red cubes were on a tray in front of him, he spontaneously said "none" when there was no cubes with this color. In fact, he was able to connect two different concepts, a lack of information and the absence of a quantity. Pretty brilliant parrot, isn't?
Before going further, below is a picture of Alex in front of his counting blocks (Credit: Brandeis University). And here is a link to a larger version (193 KB).
A 'cultured' hamburger
Now, let's look at how the researchers made the discovery that Alex possessed a "zero-like concept."
The story began when researchers started testing Alex to see whether he understood small numbers, between one and six. Zero wasn't expected of him. The researchers would lay out an array of objects of different colors and sizes, and asked questions such as "what color four?" -- meaning which color are the objects of which there are four.
Apparently, Alex was pretty good on these tests, until he got bored. So the researchers "found some more interesting toys to give as rewards." And here came the decisive experiment.
One of these apparent lapses occurred one day when an experimenter asked Alex "what color three?" Laid out before Alex were sets of two, three and six objects, each set differently colored. Alex insisted on responding: "five." This made no sense given that the answer was supposed to be a color.
After several tries the experimenter gave up and said: "OK, Alex, tell me: what color five?" "None," the bird replied. This was correct, in that there was no color that graced exactly five of the objects. The researchers went on to incorporate "none" into future trials, and Alex consistently used the word correctly, they said.
A few days after this article was published, Brandeis University decided to issue a press release adding that Alex was the "first bird to comprehend numerical concept akin to zero."
"It is doubtful that Alex's achievement, or those of some other animals such as chimps, can be completely trained; rather, it seems likely that these skills are based on simpler cognitive abilities they need for survival, such as recognition of more versus less," explained comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg.
Dr. Pepperberg's research, which uses a training method called the model-rival technique, also holds promise for teaching autistic and other learning-disabled children who have difficulty learning language, numerical concepts and even empathy.
So far, results using this learning technique with small groups of autistic children have been very promising.
The latest research work about Alex and his comprehension of zero has been published by the Journal of Comparative Psychology in its May 2005 issue (Volume 119, Issue 2) under the name "Number Comprehension by a Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), Including a Zero-Like Concept." You'll get to the abstract from this page (scroll to number #8).
A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) that was able to quantify 6 item sets (including subsets of heterogeneous groups, e.g., blue blocks within groupings of blue and green blocks and balls) us
What about that raven which understood the concept of 'nevermore'?
Modern science = Stupid parrot tricks
I always knew David Lettermen was onto something with stupid pet tricks, I'm surprised he never got a grant.
He's pining for the fjords
Thank you for the offer, Timothy.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Guess I'll have to rethink my intent when I call someone a bird brain!
On a side note, why is the concept of zero considered so advanced on the intelligence ladder? I know it was well after Greek times that man came to terms with it. But could it be the case that we were over-thinking its concept?
Maybe someone can better describe this article's subject's significance... all I know, from my own observations, is that my dog certainly demonstrates a form of awareness whenever there's zero food in its dish!
My relatives have a african grey parrot and they are in fact really smart. They even seem to answer your questions (and complete sentences or phrases). Only thing is that they bite real hard so you might want to keep a distance while talking/playing with them.
What does your Credit Report look like?
Scientists have reported today that Holand Piquepaille, perennial Slashdot whore and troll, has finally grasped the concept of $0.
"It's amazing", reported one scientist. "Although usually it takes human-level intelligence to grasp the concept of submitting news articles without any chance for a monetary return, we were able to teach the concept to Holand Piquepaille."
Unfortunately, the results are not yet conclusive, and it remains to be seen whether or not Holand Piquepaille will return all the money he duped out of people for looking at primidi.com. Scientists are hopeful, but note, "This is the first time that this concept has ever been documented in this particular species of whore, so we still need lots more evidence for the data to be conclusive."
Another researcher pointed out: "Holand has demonstrated the concept of $0, but we're not sure if he's grasped what he wanted him to, or if he's just hit on related themes like 'The amount of value my posts add to Slashdot'."
Scientists hope that further research will prove that Holand is destined to lead a life of future altruism. Keep your hopes up!
Le français vous intéresse?
A parrot that counts 0 blue blocks is all fine and dandy. But can he count --3 red balls? Or 5i yellow chips?
See, you're not so smart are you, eh, bird-brain?
Professor: Alex, tell me what color 4?
Alex: Blue, no Yelllllllllloooooooooooooooowww
Oh, I get it. polly-nomials!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
The training of Alex is an experiment which is constantly in progress. This isn't "bad science" but "science in progress."
It's kind of like condemning an experiment by reading one progress report, decades before the final report is available. And I say decades because Alex is 28 and African Grey parrots can live to be 65+ years old.
I just saw something last night on Animal Planet on the "Most Extreme" intelligent animals. Parrots were #1, specifically this bird Alex, who has been in training for almost 20 years, I think it is.
My dad has an African Grey whose name is Max. Max is not as intelligent as Alex, but he demonstrates a limited intelligence. Simple things like saying "come here" when he wants attention or saying "whoops" when he drops a piece of food. It isn't on par with the counting and identifying that Alex can do.
If you see video of Alex, it's totally amazing. He can identify what objects are made of (wood, metal, wool), he can identify colors (red, blue, yellow, green) and even count up to five--now including zero. He can even flip you attitude: "wanna go sleep" or "wanna go home" or "hungry" -- all in the middle of a training session.
More on Alex can be found here: http://www.alexfoundation.org/
Alex's trainer for the past two decades, Dr. Irene M. Pepperberg, is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, as well: http://web.media.mit.edu/~impepper/
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this 'zero quantity' by saying the label 'none.'
Newsflash: Roland Piquepaille is dumber than a parrot!
Zero is not the absence of a numerical quantity. Zero is a numerical quantity. The absence of a numerical quantity is when you don't know how much there is of something.
It's like the difference between 0 and NULL in a database. This parrot is smarter than both Roland Piquepaille and MySQL developers.
If you can ask questions involving grammar, adjectives and nouns, and be able to change them around and STILL get correct answers, it is clearly not simple comparison tricks.
Autistic tricks are about simple store/recall of rote information, but there is no evidence here of simple store/recall mechanisms being involved. This is not some piece of amateur research over a weekend, this has been going on for 15 years with consistant and repeatable results.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And it is an incredible animal already without the concept zero. It labels objects by name and properties like color and shape. But also recognize objects which are similar like keys. There is no way for the researcher to hint the solution unconsiously like what happens with the famous counting of horses and dogs (The horse taps the foot X times for the correct answer, but in reality just looks for the right signs in the face or behaviour of the owner (smart too though, sociology (-: )).
The parrot is in this case better then men in understanding language. The researchers can not talk "parrot language", but this bird can talk human language. What would be great for research if they are able to find out if this parrot has a concept of language and can translate some more familiar environment things (like trees instead of keys) and see if that translates to other parrots in the wild.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Don't diss ravens, they can make tools, sometimes more proficiently than apes ! I've seen one of these birds cut a small rectangle of spiky leaf to use as a hook to pull some juicy worms from a dead tree bark; and another cut a stick from a tree, remove the leaves then make one end into a hook for the same task, in mere seconds.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
... to think that you are so advanced you can change your basic behaviour and instincts.
:-)
Face it, you're an omnivore, like it or not. Whether you choose to eat meat or not is irrelevant - you have evolved to eat a variety of foods, including meat. Humankind is the most general of species on this planet - we survive in extreme heat, extreme cold, and everywhere in-between precisely because we can adapt to changing circumstance. Eating meat is a part of this general behaviour. I see no reason to be ashamed of what we do when it's in our nature to do it.
It may even be (given that it's generally the meat-eaters predatorial requirements for advanced tactics that drive this) that you *had* to eat meat for thousands of years before you'd evolve to the state where it was optional...
Frankly, those who espouse that we shouldn't eat other animals are mainly hypocrites. Humourous note: while checking the spelling of that, I typed "hypocr" into OSX's dashboard dictionary and it guessed at 'hypocretin'. Although it's not applicable (it's a hormone!), I'd love to adopt it instead of hypocrite. It just fits so well
Put a tethered lamb in front of a cave with fresh running water and see if the human would rather die than kill and eat the lamb. If you kill the lamb, if you'd rather die, then well and good - I respect your principles whilst simultaneously denouncing you as a fool. If you kill and eat the lamb, everything comes down to a matter of degree - when is it acceptable to eat meat and when is it not? That's an arbitrary decision made by an individual based on his/her preconceptions. No one decision is any more "right" than any other since the decision is a personal one. So stop telling me I can't have a bacon sandwich at the weekend!
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Of course I mind if you kill and eat a pet of mine - I have an emotional attachment to the animal - it's a PET!
Do I mind if you kill and eat a scorpion in the desert ? No. Knock yourself out.
It's the emotional attachment that's important - not the animal. As a child, I had a pet rabbit. If you'd tried to kill and eat it, I'd set the dog on you! I couldn't care less if you go out into the foothills and kill and eat a rabbit. I dare say there are (vegetable) farmers who would actively encourage you...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The majority of PHBs that I know consider themselves quite brainy - and they know zero as well.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
You missspelled 'avian'.
A lot of schmucks will probably treat these sorts of interesting things like novelty party tricks and move on.
:P
Most people can't even treat other people with respect, so to me it's unrealistic to expect them to ever care about anything outside their own species except for personal gain or as lunch.
Of course, there are exceptions.
What can I say? I'm just a cynical bastard.
BytesTemplar.com
So, I'm amazed at the avian capability, but surprised at humanity's clunky, late, and worshipful grasp of zero. I read, "Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife, and it took us a hell of a long time to get a simple survival idea to cross from instinct into formalized intellect.
I'm not a behavioral science PhD. Yet, How surprising is it that any animal can recognize zero in respect to color? How many yellow fruits are on that green tree? "None, next tree." How many gray mates are there on the brown branches? "None, next area." We have to think that the loser parrots who hung out at the tree with zero fruit didn't do so well in the evolution crap shoot.
Zero is not so mystically intelligent as we think. Our belly and lungs definitely understand zero. But zero came late to our number systems. Our formalization of zero might well be a mystical leap of intellect, but only history will prove if we are as smart as we think we are. There are a lot of zeros out there we aren't grasping; zero dodos left, zero ozone defense in places, and zero vaccines for modern plagues.
I look forward to the day when Alex and Mr. Bean learn to solve calculus. Then he can exclaim that the limit of e^x as x approaches infinity is infinity. Negative numbers and imaginary numbers and he'll be doing better than most undergrads.
It should be noted Mr. Bean's QWERTY typing is abominable. So his C programming is not as strong as other posts might have suggested.
Alex was taught "none" to describe when two blocks of different colors but the same size were presented and Alex was asked "Which color bigger?" In that case, Alex used the word "none" to indicate that they were the same size.
To go from using "none" to indicate that there was no difference to use it to indicate that there were no items of the described characteristics is a small leap for an adult human, but very difficult for small human children and parrots.
Non-human primates can't make that kind of jump. In some ways, Alex, with the brain the size of a walnut, is smarter than an ape with a much bigger brain! Of course, evolution would have selected for a low-weight, highly effective brain in birds because of the weight cost of flying.
Based on what's described in the newest article, I actually suspect that Alex was looking for a word to express just this concept, or something like it. He may have had the concept before he had a word to describe it.
Pepperberg, by the way, knows that she is working in a suspect realm of science. If she cannot document something with experimental evidence that holds up under statistical analysis, she won't say it. That also means that her scientific writing is almost impossible to parse. It's great research, but if you read too much of it, your eyes will bleed.
The best example is the proof that Alex can be ornery. Anyone who owns a parrot knows the #$%^ birds are ornery. But when Alex acted up and proceeded to answer questions wrong, Alex went through every possible answer except the correct one. Pepperberg showed that the probability of that happening by chance was extremely unlikely, and that the only reasonable explanation was that Alex was deliberately answering incorrectly.
One last thing: If Alex is simply answering questions, Alex has an accuracy rate of about 80%. If Alex is competing with another parrot or someone Alex doesn't like, the accuracy goes up to 100%. When attempting to give incorrect answers, again, the accuracy is 100%
There is no doubt in my mind that Alex considers the humans around him to be the inferior species, to be messed with at will. If Pepperberg thinks that as well, she won't say it...until she can prove it conclusively with experiments and statistics.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
"And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
You missspelled 'avian'."
You misspelled "misspelled"...
_____________________________
Dyslexics of the world untie!
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
i saw a crow drop a walnut into an intersection from a street light. the crow then flew down to the side walk, WAITED FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE, then walked into the intersection to collect the edibles from the car-crushed walnut. he let out a loud in disapproval of how quickly the light had changed again as he was forced to retreat from the street and his score.
"There was no sex." - hoggoth
Alex has zero and little prairie dogs - the universal lunch - have a complete language, including words for color!!!
i on.htm
http://www.prairiedog.info/Prairie_Dog_Communicat
"Basically, prairie dogs are a universal lunch item. Everybody likes to feed on prairie dogs," says animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University. And the prairie dogs know that. When a predator approaches they emit a series of warning chirps.
Prairie dogs can talk. At least that's the startling conclusion reached by Slobodchikoff. His research flies in the face of conventional scientific thinking on the subject of animal intelligence. He maintains that prairie dogs can convey complex information through a language more sophisticated than that of any animal ever studied. Slobodchikoff has documented more than 100 prairie dog words all revolving around the same subject: predators. From his observation tower on the edge of a prairie dog colony outside Flagstaff, Slobodchikoff operates a directional microphone, a tape recorder and a video camera. From this vantage point, he can spot intruders, such as hawks, cats, dogs, and men and record the alarm calls these potential threats trigger in the prairie dogs.
"Each time we do experiments I'm surprised because each time even I don't think these animals have the capabilities that our experiments show them to have," says Slobodchikoff.
Back at his lab he digitizes his audio field tape into sonograms which show what each alarm call "looks" like, complete with adjectives.
The professor has discovered that prairie dogs use adjectives to differentiate objects. For example, they can describe the color of clothes on a human and whether he is tall or short. They can also describe how fast a man is moving or whether he is carrying a gun. And there's evidence that the animals can remember that specific person for up to two months.
Each prairie dog colony appears to have its own dialect, much like New Yorkers sound different from Southerners. But researchers believe the basic language is the same. That is, a prairie dog from Arizona could talk to a prairie dog from New Mexico.