Wednesday, 4 March 2020

Bird Brain Bookies?

New Zealand's alpine parrot, the Kea, has always been noted for its intelligence but a new study has demonstrated, that like humans and apes, they can calculate the odds (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/03/study-finds-parrots-weigh-up-probabilities-to-make-decisions). The birds were able to make decisions based on the likelihood of getting black tokens (associated with reward) rather than orange ones (no reward) on the basis of seeing the proportions of the 2 tokens in transparent jars. It's yet another example of 'unique' human abilities being more widespread than was suspected.
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