iampepper16

The story had some basis in reality, but was overblown. Alex saw himself in a mirror and asks "What's that?"..."What color?"--questions he'd ask when he saw novel things. (Of course, that in itself is interesting...that he recognized novelty, was curious, and had the ability to question us!) So we have no idea if he really understood if he knew it that he was seeing himself...we just don't know.

We treat our birds like human toddlers...so they have plenty of "down" time, plenty of time for play (with their toys and with the humans in the lab). We do talk to them all the time, but, again, that's the way one treats toddlers.

All our birds can opt out of sessions...they can say "Wanna go back" (to their cage)--or they can simply ignore us! Or, like Alex and Griffin, they can 'play games'--so Alex and Griffin will sometimes give us all the wrong answers, and we suspect that they actually are having some fun with us.

BTW...Alex died of a heart arrhythmia...my veterinarian said that she has seen this even in very young parrots who live in households...so I doubt that stress was a particular issue.

I was most surprised when Alex transferred the concept of "none"--trained with respect to the concept of absence of similarity or difference between two objects--to the absence of a numerical set. He had, without any training, figured out a zero-like concept, something that western civilization didn't have until around the 1600s. It wasn't identical to the human concept of zero, but quite similar.

I don't study cockatoos, but my colleagues in Austria are doing amazing work with them. These studies mostly involve some kind of tool use--cockatoos are the "oranguans" of the avian world. This type of intelligence is different from that demonstrated by Alex, but is equally important.

We would have continued to work on some number concepts, and would have explored further the possibility of his understanding of how his labels were made of different sounds that could be recombined to make new labels. We would have done some of the tests we've done with Griffin, as well. Most importantly, Alex was beginning to learn how to act as Griffin's trainer (rather than just interrupting Griffin's sessions), and we were very excited about that aspect of the work.