C Barrington-Leigh

The new XPRIZE on Interspecies Communication, with a $10M purse will launch next month. It will challenge teams to demonstrate ethical, verified two-way communication with wild animals, advancing coexistence and cooperation. Dr. Irene Pepperberg spoke to us today about her pioneering work with grey parrots, training them in English to perform many tasks at 6-year old human skill level. “Clearly, animals know more than we think and think a great deal more than we know.” It wasn’t easy when she started. The feedback to her first grant review: “what are you smoking?” And now, her parrots ask questions and learn from the answers. They ask for what they want. She has taught her parrots 100 English labels for objects and materials, exact quantities up to 8 (and addition and subtraction), colors, shapes, materials, concepts like same/different, absence, a zero-like concept (absence of a set, on his own, with no training), relative size comparisons, optical illusions, and they make new word combinations (calling the banana chip “banacker” for a banana cracker). They have a visual working memory (tracking moving cups) that beats adults with 4 swaps. They do inference by exclusion (when you show where food is not located, they figure out where it is). Bird brains look very different at first, a smooth unfolded organ with no cerebral cortex, but further research found a relatively large cortical area similar to non-human primates in relative size and connectivity. They have a dense processor, doing same thing as human children. “Bird brain should be a complement,” she concluded.