African Grey Parrot Outperforms Children and Harvard College Students
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
African grey parrot outperforms children and college students:
Harvard researchers compared how 21 human adults and 21 6- to 8-year-old children stacked up against an African grey parrot named Griffin in a complex version of the classic shell game.
It worked like this: Tiny colored pom-poms were covered with cups and then shuffled, so participants had to track which object was under which cup. The experimenter then showed them a pom-pom that matched one of the same color hidden under one of the cups and asked them to point at the cup. (Griffin, of course, used his beak to point.) The participants were tested on tracking two, three, and four different-colored pom-poms. The position of the cups were swapped zero to four times for each of those combinations. Griffin and the students did 120 trials; the children did 36.
[...] So how did the parrot fare? Griffin outperformed the 6- to 8-year-olds across all levels on average, and he performed either as well as or slightly better than the 21 Harvard undergraduates on 12 of the 14 of trial types.
[...] "Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That's pretty freaking awesome," said Hrag Pailian, the postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who led the experiment. "We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-meds, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts."
[...] To be fair, the Harvard students did manage to keep (some) of their Crimson pride intact. On the final two tests, which involved the most items and the most movement, the adults had the clear edge. Griffin's average dipped toward the children's performance - though never below it. The researchers were unable to determine the precise reason for this drop, but they believe it has something to do with the way human intelligence works (arguably making the Harvard students' victory a matter of performance enhancement of the genetic variety).
Journal Reference:
Hrag Pailian, Susan E. Carey, Justin Halberda, et al. Age and Species Comparisons of Visual Mental Manipulation Ability as Evidence for its Development and Evolution [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64666-1)
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