A Bird Brain That is Not a Birdbrain

Harvard is reputedly one of the best universities in the world. 

But things are not always as they seem to be. I stumbled upon an intriguing article in The Harvard Gazette published July 02, 2020 titled “When a bird brain tops Harvard students on a test”. 

Yes, you’ve read it right! An African grey parrot (Scientific name: Psittacus erithacus) moved to the head of the class in a visual memory test when pitted against Harvard undergrads!

Researchers compared how 21 human adults and twenty-one 6- to 8-year-old children stacked up against Griffin the parrot 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.

The game tests the brain’s ability to retain memory of items that are no longer in view, and then updating when faced with new information, like a change in location. This cognitive system is known as visual working memory and is the one of the foundations for intelligent behavior. 

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 students on 12 of the 14 of trial types. 

Three graphs indicating the parrot's success against the human participants. Courtesy of Hrag Pailian and Irene Pepperberg 

That’s not bad at all for a so-called bird brain. A case of a bird brain that is not a birdbrain. 

Still, it is not as if Harvard’s uni ranking is likely to be affected. 

Additional Notes: The above is part of a study published in Scientific Reports in May. The researchers were investigating the limits of the brain’s ability to process and update mental representations. In other words, they were looking at the “working” portion of the visual working memory system. The ability is referred to as manipulation. And ultimately, they were hoping to gain insights into the development and origin of the visual working memory system and the nature of human intelligence. 

At a broad level, the paper’s findings hint at the possible evolutionary origins of the ability to manipulate visual memory. Griffin’s success suggests it is not limited to humans and might be shared across species derived from a common ancestor. In this case, the ancestor would be the dinosaurs, since humans and parrots are separated by more than 300 million years of evolution. 

As one of the authors of the study, Irene Pepperberg cautioned: “It’s not that we proved everything provable. It’s that we’ve demonstrated a behavior that leads to a lot of different questions”. 

Griffin was a prime candidate for this experiment because the researchers needed an animal whose brain was functionally similar to humans but evolutionarily distant for comparison. It was also likely that parrots possessed the manipulation ability because of environmental pressures in the wild, like tracking their hungry fledglings or threats like predators. Plus, Griffin is always ready to show off his brain power and earn a few cashews as a reward. 

“He’s the kind of student who asks you, ‘What do I have to do to get the A?’” and then goes and does it, Pepperberg said.