Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:02:01 -0400
Message-Id: <199805181502.LAA06086@small-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Martha H Greenberg <marthag@MIT.EDU>
To: lilygreenberg@juno.com, spg11@columbia.com
Subject: article from boston globe online


This bird talks, counts, and reads - a
 little 

 By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 05/18/98 

      UCSON - It's not that he can correctly name objects, colors,
      and even materials that's most amazing about Alex. It's not
 even that he can count up to six objects. 

 No, the most impressive accomplishment of this 22-year-old gray
 parrot is the way he's beginning to master the rudiments of
 reading. ''Sssssss,'' he sounds when his teacher, biologist Irene
 Pepperberg, shows him a red plastic S-shaped refrigerator magnet.
 When she pushes an H next to it, Alex promptly says ''Shhhhh.''
 When she shows him the letters OR, Alex clearly enunciates ''or.''

 Alex is one smart bird. 

 Not that he can say more words than other parrots. The record for
 that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, goes to Prudle, a
 gray parrot in England with a vocabulary of almost 800 words.
 Alex knows only about 100 words, but has a crucial edge over
 other parrots: When he says something, he means it. And he
 knows what he means. 

 People had always assumed that parrots could only ''parrot'' words;
 they could mimic sounds but had no understanding of their
 meaning. Pepperberg carefully designed experiments to find out
 for sure. And after devoting 21 years to teaching Alex (and, more
 recently, two other gray parrots and one parakeet) and evaluating
 his language abilities, she has proved that to Alex, at least, the
 words really do have meaning. 

 Holding a colored cloth ball in front of the bird, Pepperberg asks
 ''What matter?'' in the kind of laboratory Pidgin she uses to train
 her subjects. Alex - who can identify wood, plastic, metal and
 paper, among other ''matter'' - clearly says ''wool.'' Having
 answered correctly, he's entitled to a reward - but he has to ask
 for it. Unlike animals in conventional conditioning experiments,
 he gets nothing unless he asks for it by name, after having given a
 right answer to a question. ''Want a nut,'' he says, and then
 happily begins nibbling away at the cashew he is given. 

 Next, Pepperberg presents him a tray that holds a jumbled mix of
 six green blocks, five green balls, three rose-colored balls, and
 four rose-colored blocks. She asks, ''How many rose block?'' After
 studying the tray, Alex will usually answer with the correct
 number - a task that requires not only counting ability but also an
 understanding of colors and shapes, and the ability to sort out the
 categories. (The numbers, types, and colors are changed each time,
 so he's not just memorizing). 

 In other words, he has to do some serious thinking. 

 Those abilities, comparable to the communicative abilities that
 other researchers have found in chimpanzees, gorillas, and
 dolphins, ''have surprised us,'' said Donald Griffin, a biologist who
 has taught at Harvard, Cornell and Rockefeller Universities and
 currently works at Harvard's Concord Field Station, an animal
 research facility. 

 Such studies provided the initial inspiration for Pepperberg's work
 when she saw PBS's Nova program about dolphin and ape
 communication. The research is beginning to provide scientists
 with new insights about animals' mental capabilities. But this
 particular complex task that Alex mastered, counting and
 categorizing a mixture of objects, is one that no other non-human
 species has yet accomplished. 

 Alex, however, does not always give the right answers; he's right
 about 80 percent of the time. But depending on his mood, some
 days he will give an incorrect answer every time - something he
 couldn't possibly do unless he knew the right answers, and just
 mischievously refused to give them. 

 ''There's something going on that is not what you expect from
 animals,'' Pepperberg says. When he's being contrary, she suggests,
 he may be expressing frustration at ''so many years of tests and
 sessions'' by engaging in ''a little bit of game playing.''

 On a recent Sunday afternoon in Pepperberg's lab, Alex was
 unwilling to answer any tough questions. He normally gets the
 weekends off. While he showed great curiosity toward a
 newcomer in his domain, even climbing onto the visitor's hand
 and nibbling his thumb gently (''that's courtship behavior,''
 Pepperberg pointed out), Alex was not about to give up his time
 off. 

 According to a variety of standard tests, Alex and his fellow gray
 parrots, a species native to west-central Africa, have cognitive
 abilities comparable to a 4- or 5-year-old child, she says.
 Emotionally, however, they show ''all the negative, self-centered
 behavior of a 2- or 3-year old,'' she adds. ''That's why you have so
 many abandoned parrots.''

 For example, Griffin, the youngest of her three parrots, now has a
 bedraggled, moth-eaten look. He got that way while Pepperberg
 went away for a week and left the parrots in the care of her
 students. Griffin was so upset at being abandoned that he pulled
 out his feathers. 

 Pepperberg, whose Harvard doctorate is in theoretical chemistry
 but whose career has been devoted to studying animal
 communication, documents all her work meticulously. She has
 published her results in respected, peer-reviewed scientific
 journals, something some animal communication researchers fail to
 do. Pepperberg is also cautious in how she characterizes her
 research subject's abilities. 

 ''I never claim that he has language,'' she says of her star pupil
 Alex. ''You could never have the kind of conversation with him
 that you would have with another person - a two-way
 conversation. But he can tell us what he wants, and answer
 questions posed to him.''

 Until Pepperberg's ''sound and important work, we did not think
 that parrots could mean what they say,'' adds biologist Griffin,
 who has made a career of studying the abilities of animals. 

 Griffin, author of the 1992 book ''Animal Minds,'' believes that
 such work can be valuable in helping humans understand the
 thought processes and feelings of non-human species. ''There is a
 way of getting at what are they thinking and feeling: Letting them
 tell us,'' he said in an interview. While we know almost nothing
 about how animals, including parrots, communicate with each
 other in the wild, and what kinds of information they share,
 teaching them to speak and understand our language ''might be a
 very good entry wedge into it.''

 What does this research mean about what's going on inside Alex's
 brain? Pepperberg says that ''working with these birds for 20-some
 years, there's no question in my mind, on a personal level, that
 there's consciousness there. But I have not come up with any tests
 that I believe could show it.''

 Griffin agrees with that hunch. Some scientists are ''bashful about
 inferring conscious thinking, as I am not,'' he said. ''It's been a
 sort of no-no area to scientists.''

 In fact, Griffin has come up with a term for what he calls this
 ''curious reluctance'' of his colleagues to speak about animal
 consciousness: ''mentophobia.''

 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.''

 Alex, however, has simpler things on his mind at the moment.
 Tiring of his visit with a stranger, he states his desire clearly:
 ''Want to go back.'' Is he thinking about going back to his cage,
 back to nature, or back to the African rainforests that were home
 to his ancestors? Probably not. He settles for going back to the
 table he left a few minutes ago, and eats another cashew. 

 This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 05/18/98. 
 ) Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company. 

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