At the same time, some scientists still claim that dogs, apes and parrots "don't really talk" even if they use a couple hundred word vocabulary lively and creatively. Some people do not really think either
They just regurgitate.
The most "controversial" first (ha!) -
http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/
http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Animals/parrot_abs.html
Testing a Language - Using Parrot for Telepathy
by RUPERT SHELDRAKE and AIMÉE MORGANA
ABSTRACT:
Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N'kisi, often seemed to respond to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner. We set up a series of trials to test whether this apparent telepathic ability would be expressed in formal tests in which Aimée and the parrot were in different rooms, on different floors, under conditions in which the parrot could receive no sensory information from Aimée or from anyone else. During these trials Aimée and the parrot were both videotaped continuously. At the beginning of each trial, Aimée opened a numbered sealed envelope containing a photograph, and then looked at it for two minutes. These photographs corresponded to a prespecified list of key words in N'kisi's vocabulary, and were selected and randomized in advance by a third party. We conducted a total of 149 two-minute trials. The recordings of N'kisi during these trials were transcribed blind by three independent transcribers. Their transcripts were generally in good agreement. Using a majority scoring method, in which at least two of the three transcribers were in agreement, N'kisi said one or more of the key words in 71 trials. He scored 23 hits: the key words he said corresponded to the target pictures. In a Randomized Permutation Analysis (RPA), there were as many or more hits than N'kisi actually scored in only 5 out of 20,000 random permutations, giving a p value of 5/20,000 or 0.00025. In a Bootstrap Resampling Analysis (BRA), only 4 out of 20,000 permutations equalled or exceeded N'kisi's actual score (p = 0.0002). Both by the RPA and BRA the mean number of hits expected by chance was 12, with a standard deviation of 3. N'kisi repeated key words more when they were hits than when they were misses. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that N'kisi was reacting telepathically to Aimée's mental activity.
Published in http://www.scientificexploration.org/jo ... ldrake.pdf
Alex, the African Grey Parrot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parrot%29
Alex (1976 - September 6, 2007[1]) was an African Grey Parrot and the subject of a thirty-year (1977-2007) experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard and Brandeis University. Pepperberg bought Alex in a regular pet shop when he was about one year old.[2] The name Alex is an acronym for Avian Learning EXperiment.[3] His successor was Griffin.
Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that birds were not intelligent and could only use words by mimicking, but Alex's accomplishments indicated that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively.[4] Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a par with that of dolphins and great apes.[5] She also reported that Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old human[3] and had not even reached his full potential by the time he died.[6] She said that the bird had the emotional level of a human two-year-old at the time of his death.[7]
Accomplishments
Pepperberg, listing Alex's accomplishments in 1999, said he could identify fifty different objects and recognize quantities up to six; that he could distinguish seven colors and five shapes, and understand the concepts of "bigger", "smaller", "same", and "different," and that he was learning "over" and "under".[2] Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words,[8] but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. If asked the difference between two objects, he also answered that, but if there was no difference between the objects, he said “none.” Alex could even add to a limited extent. When he was tired of being tested, he would say “Wanna go back,” meaning he wanted to go back to his cage. If the researcher displayed annoyance, Alex tried to diffuse it with the phrase, “I’m sorry.” If he said “Wanna banana”, but was offered a nut instead, he stared in silence, asked for the banana again, or took the nut and threw it at the researcher. When asked questions in the context of research testing, he gave the correct answer approximately 80 percent of the time.[9]
Preliminary research also seems to indicate that Alex could carry over the concept of four blue balls of wool on a tray to four notes from a piano. Dr. Pepperberg was also training him to recognize the Arabic numeral “4” as “four.”
In July 2005, Pepperberg reported that Alex understood the concept of zero.[10] In July 2006, she discovered that Alex's perception of optical illusions was similar to human perception.[11]
Dr. Pepperberg was training the bird to recognize English phonemes, in the hopes that he would conceptually relate an English written word with the spoken word.[12] He could identify sounds made by two-letter combinations such as SH and OR.[12]
Alex's training used a model/rival technique, where the student (Alex) observes one trainer interacting with another. One of the trainers models the desired student behavior, and is seen by the student as a rival for the other trainer's attention. The trainer and model/rival exchange roles so the student can see that the process is interactive.
http://www.alexfoundation.org/
Animal bodies, human minds
William Allen Hillix, Duane M. Rumbaugh
http://books.google.fi/books?id=NsOMCzO ... navlinks_s
Kanzi, a bonobo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanzi
Article about Kanzi -
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 22981.html
Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues kept adding symbols to Kanzi’s keyboard and laminated sheets of paper. First Kanzi used 6 symbols, then 18, finally 348. The symbols refer to familiar objects (yogurt, key, tummy, bowl), favored activities (chase, tickle), and even some concepts considered fairly abstract (now, bad).
Kanzi learned to combine these symbols in regular ways, or in what linguists call"proto-grammar."Once, Savage-Rumbaugh says, on an outing in a forest by the Georgia State University laboratory where he was raised, Kanzi touched the symbols for"marshmallow"and"fire."Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and toasted the marshmallows on a stick.
Koko, a gorilla:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_%28gorilla%29
Also, see the book by V.B. Dröscher - "Klug wie die Schlangen" - "Wiser than men" from 1962 for some basic awesomeness from nature.
Jackdaws and other research by Konrad Lorenz -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Lorenz
http://www.avianweb.com/jackdaws.html
The complex social interactions that occur in groups of Jackdaws was studied by Konrad Lorenz and he published detailed descriptions of the Jackdaw's social behaviours in his book "King Solomon's Ring". Lorenz put coloured rings on Jackdaws' legs so that individual birds could be easily identified and he caged them in the winter because of their annual migration from Austria. Lorenz observed Jackdaws' hierarchical group structure with dominance of the higher-ranking birds over others. He noticed Jackdaws' strong male–female bonding and that each bird of a pair occupy about the same position in the hierarchy. He reported that a low-ranked female Jackdaw rocketed up the Jackdaw social ladder when she became the mate of a high-ranking male. He also described some Jackdaw calls.
Jackdaws have been observed sharing food and objects. The active giving of food is rare in primates, and in birds is found mainly in the context of parental care and courtship. Jackdaws show much higher levels of active giving than documented for chimpanzees. The function of this behaviour is not fully understood, although it has been found to be compatible with hypotheses of mutualism, reciprocity and harassment avoidance.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/k ... awler=true
Short-term observational spatial memory in Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) and Ravens (Corvus corax)
Authors: Scheid, Christelle1; Bugnyar, Thomas2
Source: Animal Cognition, Volume 11, Number 4, October 2008 , pp. 691-698(8)
Publisher: Springer
Abstract:
Observational spatial memory (OSM) refers to the ability of remembering food caches made by other individuals, enabling observers to find and pilfer the others' caches. Within birds, OSM has only been demonstrated in corvids, with more social species such as Mexican jays (Aphelocoma ultramarine) showing a higher accuracy of finding conspecific' caches than less social species such as Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana). However, socially dynamic corvids such as ravens (Corvus corax) are capable of sophisticated pilfering manoeuvres based on OSM. We here compared the performance of ravens and jackdaws (Corvus monedula) in a short-term OSM task. In contrast to ravens, jackdaws are socially cohesive but hardly cache and compete over food caches. Birds had to recover food pieces after watching a human experimenter hiding them in 2, 4 or 6 out of 10 possible locations. Results showed that for tests with two, four and six caches, ravens performed more accurately than expected by chance whereas jackdaws did not. Moreover, ravens made fewer re-visits to already inspected cache sites than jackdaws. These findings suggest that the development of observational spatial memory skills is linked with the species' reliance on food caches rather than with a social life style per se.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_ ... human_gaze
We all know that people sometimes change their behavior when someone is looking their way. A new study in Current Biology shows that jackdaws, birds related to crows and ravens with eyes that appear similar to human eyes, can do the same.
"Jackdaws seem to recognize the eye's role in visual perception, or at the very least they are extremely sensitive to the way that human eyes are oriented," said Auguste von Bayern, formerly of the University of Cambridge and now at the University of Oxford.
(this one should be bloody friggin obvious if you have spent any time observing jackdaws - or, letting them observe you)
http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/04/ ... umans.html
A fascinating recent article on an ability usually thought to be human, but apparently shared by some birds:
von Bayern, A.M.P., & Emery, N.J. (2009). Jackdaws respond to human attentional states and communicative cues in different contexts. Current Biology, 19 (7), 602-606.
These researchers looked at the ability of jackdaws to pay attention to the eye movements of nearby humans-- a skill that human beings show from an early age. Human infants develop in the first year of life the ability to look at another person's gaze and figure out what he or she is looking at, as well as the ability to use their own eyes as "pointers" and attract another person's attention to something by looking at the object and then back at the person. However, animals like chimpanzees and dogs do not seem to be able to "read" eyes in this way, although they pay attention to the way a person's head is turned. Can birds demonstrate a skill that chimps and dogs cannot?
von Bayern and Emery put out food for their jackdaws and then timed how long it took them to approach it when an unfamiliar (so, from the jackdaws' viewpoint, possibly dangerous) person was gazing at it. The jackdaws hesitated to approach the food that a stranger was looking at, but readily approached it when a familiar person gazed at it. But the jackdaws did not seem to be able to follow a steady gaze to find food they could not see; a familiar person had to shift the eyes toward the food and point in order to get the birds to pick up on the help that was offered.
Why should jackdaws be able to use humans' eye movements or gaze to get information, when "higher" animals cannot? Does this study mean that other birds can also pick up cues from humans' eyes? One possible reason for jackdaws--but not necessarily other birds-- to have this ability is that jackdaws have dark pupils and light irises, as many humans do. This pattern makes for a complex and attention-getting visual stimulus which may
be familiar to these birds because they have looked at other jackdaws. Of course, human eyes are even more complex patterns, because they have the surrounding white area as well as the contrast between pupil and iris.
Honey guide birds:
http://www.mailsbroadcast.com/b25.honey.bird.htm
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/08/i ... m-bbc.html
Honeyguide birds are named for a remarkable habit seen in one or two species: they guide large mammals like "Ratel or baboons" to bee colonies.
Once the mammal opens the hive and takes the honey, the bird feeds on the remaining wax and larvae.
In this 3-minute segment from a BBC series, David Attenborough introduces the honeyguide, a bird that intentionally communicates with humans. This Kenyan bird has presumably been interacting with humans (and perhaps other mammals) for thousands of years, directing them to locations were African honeybee colonies can be found. After the mammal raids the honeycomb, the bird can enjoy the leftovers
Although it's not mentioned in this video excerpt, I believe a similar interaction has been claimed by North American hunters with regard to crows and ravens, which by legend and modern stories will lead a hunter toward a deer, knowing that after the animal is killed and field-dressed, there will be lots of carrion to enjoy.
To be continued...
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