Alex and Cognition of Zero (None)

[danmcq]

I thought others might enjoy reading part of an article on Alex and his cognitive abilities. These Greys are much smarter than many believe. If you haven't already, start introducing numbers and counting to your greys.

 

Enjoy:

 

Alex, a 28-year-old Grey parrot, recently began—unprompted—using the word “none” to describe an absence of quantity, according to researchers at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Alex thus possesses a “zero-like concept,” wrote the scientists.

 

Years earlier, Alex had been taught another meaning of “none,” as a lack of information, they added. But his feat was to extend the concept to a context involving numbers, during a test of his counting skills.

 

The researchers, Irene Pepperberg and Jesse Gordon, described the findings in the May issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, a research journal.

 

Alex’s apparent insight into nothingness doesn’t necessarily extend to other arithmetical talents, the researchers noted: the researchers found these to lag in some respects behind those of young human children.

 

The scientists also said it will take further study to determine whether Alex—who has been the subject of intelligence and communication tests throughout his life—really understands zero.

 

Zero and none “are not identical,” Pepperberg wrote in a recent email. But since Alex never learned “zero,” the researchers said, it’s impressive that he started using a word he knew to denote something like it: an absence of a quantity.

 

Also unclear, though, was whether by “none” he meant no colors, no objects or something else.

 

“We just started yet another series of experiments to see if he can easily be trained to understand that ‘none’ can be used for true zero,” Pepperberg said via email. It looks like he can, she added, but it’s “far too early to make serious claims.”

 

Chimps and possibly squirrel monkeys show some understanding of zero, but only after training, the researchers said. So Alex’s feat is the first time this has been documented in a bird, “and the first time it occurred spontaneously,” Pepperberg said via email.

 

But the achievement didn’t come without a few bumps.

 

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.

 

Alex performed well on this, with no training, for dozens of trials, the researchers recounted. But then he balked. Alex started ignoring questions, or giving wrong answers, seemingly deliberately. He seemed to enjoy the experimenters’ frustrated reactions, they said.

 

There was evidence, they added, that his stubbornness stemmed from boredom with the rewards he had been getting for right answers. The researchers found some more interesting toys to give as rewards. After two weeks of obstructionism, Alex grudgingly returned to the game, though he occasionally seemed to lapse back.

 

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.

 

“We cannot determine what cognitive process led to this behavior,” the researchers wrote. “We suggest only that his action, occurring soon after a period of noncompliance, resulted from a lack of interest in the given task and was a possible attempt to make the procedure more challenging.”

 

[MarcusCAG]

The original post has been removed.

Edited April 1, 2016 by MarcusCAG

[danmcq]

I forget where I got this article from. It was obviously before the untimely passing of Alex. It was not written by Dr. Pepperberg. Your right, she did mention portions of this in both her books, of which I have as well.

 

I was going through many articles I have stored on grey cognition, as I use them as reference in how I work with Dayo. I posted this in hopes others would read and realize their greys are only limited by the concepts their owners take the time to teach them. Granted, some are a very long trek, but if you hang in there for the long run, they will grasp and use them in daily life.