Cockatoos Have Greater Cognitive Ability Than a 4-year-old Human

Researchers from the the universities of Vienna and Oxford have found that cockatoos have an understanding of "object permanence" that rivals apes and four-year-old humans.

And understanding of object permanence is, for instance, knowing that a drawer is still full of junk even though it cannot seen while closed or knowing that a car entering a tunnel will at some point emerge on the other side, even though it cannot be seen between entry and exit.

Being able to track objects while they are out of sight is cognitively demanding.

Playing peek-a-boo with a baby is one way to teach a child about object permanence. Disappear from the infant's view and then reappear and it's as if you've come out of thin air. But the child will eventually learn that just because it cannot see you does not mean you are not there.

Researcher Alice Auersperg and her colleagues investigated spatial memory and tracking in animals and humans.

Classically used experiments for testing cognitive ability in humans and animals include scenarios designed to test understanding of "transposition," "translocation" and "rotation." For "transposition" tests, the subject can be asked to track an object after it is placed underneath one of several cups and the cups are interchanged several times. In "rotation" tasks, several equal cups (one bearing a reward) are aligned in parallel on a rotatable platform, which is rotated at different angles to measure the subject's understanding of their position relative to the target. "Translocation" tasks are similar except that the cups are not rotated but the test subject is carried around the arrangement and released at different angles to the cup alignment.

Human children do not reliably solve transposition tasks until three or four years of age. Children find translocation tasks easier than rotation tasks and solve them at two to three years of age.

Auersperg and her colleagues used the same types of tests on eight cockatoos, birds known for their inquisitive and playful nature. They found that the majority of the eight birds "readily and spontaneously solved transposition, rotation and translocation tasks."

Another test called the "Piagetian invisible displacement task," which places a reward underneath a cup before the cups are concealed behind screens, proved to be a challenge for the birds.

"Interestingly and just opposite to human toddlers our cockatoos had more problems solving the Piagetian invisible displacements than the transposition task with which children struggle until the age of four," Auersperg said. "Transpositions are highly demanding in terms of attention since two occluding objects are moved simultaneously. Nevertheless, in contrast to apes, which find single swaps easier than double the cockatoos perform equally in both conditions."

The birds also exhibited little difficulty preforming rotation and translocation tasks.

Children tend to succeed in translocation tasks easier than rotation tasks, but the cockatoos showed no significant differences between the two tasks.

"We assume that the ability to fly and prey upon or being preyed upon from the air is likely to require pronounced spatial rotation abilities and may be a candidate trait influencing the animals' performance in rotation and translocation tasks," said Auguste von Bayern from the University of Oxford.

The research is published in the journal Journal of Comparative Psychology.