A
Thinking Bird, or Just Another Birdbrain?
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By DINITIA SMITH
TUCSON, Ariz. -- "Calm
down," Alex, an African
Gray parrot, told Dr. Irene Pepperberg, the
scientist at the University
of Arizona who owns him.
"Don't tell me to calm down,"
Dr. Pepperberg snapped.
Sometimes Dr. Pepperberg
and Alex squabble like an
old married couple. He even
says, "I love you."
For the last 22 years, Dr.
Pepperberg has been teaching
Alex, who is 23, to do complex
tasks of the sort that
only a few nonhuman species
-- chimpanzees, for
instance -- have been able
to perform. But unlike those
other creatures, Alex can
talk, or at least, he can
vocalize. And, Dr. Pepperberg
says, Alex doesn't just
imitate human speech, as
other parrots do -- Alex can
think. His actions are not
just an instinctive response,
she says, but rather a result
of reasoning and choice.
Assertions like Dr.
Pepperberg's are at the
center of a highly
emotional debate about
whether thought is
solely the domain of
humans, or whether it
can exist in other
animals. Although
many people are
intrigued by the idea
that animals may be
capable of some form
of abstract reasoning and
communication, scientists
often ascribe what looks
like clever behavior to
mimicry or rote learning
or even, in some cases,
unconscious cues by a trainer.
So, just how smart is Alex?
The question of animal intelligence
goes back at least
to Descartes and his famous
aphorism, "I think,
therefore I am." Animals
cannot think, said Descartes,
and therefore are inferior
to humans. And for many
theologians and philosophers,
the ability to think gives
man a unique closeness to
God.
Parrots, of course, are famous
mimics, and some
parrots have bigger vocabularies
than Alex. But no
parrot, says Dr. Pepperberg,
has been able to perform
tasks as complex as Alex
can. And she believes that
when Alex vocalizes, he
is expressing the results of his
thoughts, not mere mimicry.
For instance, when she
asks Alex what color corn
is, he answers yellow, even
though there is no corn
around. This means, she says, he
has an abstract concept
of what the words "color,"
"corn" and "yellow" mean.
He has not simply
memorized them, but can
apply them to different
objects.
Chimpanzees and dolphins
have been able to perform
equally complex tasks, though
the tasks differ from
those given to Alex because
of the differences between
species. But chimps and
dolphins, obviously, cannot
vocalize in the way Alex
does.
Few scientists would dispute
that Alex is doing
something unusual in the
history of animal studies. At
least, his behavior is more
advanced than that of most
other parrots who have been
the subject of scientific
experiments. But scientists
differ on the implications of
Alex's behavior.
Until now, Dr. Pepperberg
has published her work in
scientific journals, but
in January Harvard University
Press will publish "The
Alex Studies," a book
summarizing her experiments
with Alex.
Dr. Pepperberg bought Alex
at a garden-variety pet
store in Chicago when he
was about a year old with the
idea of studying him. As
far as she knew, he had no
particular pedigree, and
she is not even sure whether he
is particularly smart in
relation to other parrots. Now
she is trying to replicate
his training with another Gray
Parrot, Griffin.
Dr. Pepperberg, listing Alex's
accomplishments, said
he could identify 50 different
objects and recognize
quantities up to 6; that
he could distinguish 7 colors and
5 shapes, and understand
"bigger," "smaller," "same"
and "different," and that
he was learning the concepts of
"over" and "under." Hold
a tray of different shapes and
colored objects in front
of him, as Dr. Pepperberg was
doing the other day as a
reporter watched, and he can
distinguish an object by
its color, shape and the
material it is made of.
(Dr. Pepperberg said she
frequently changed objects
to make sure Alex wasn't
just memorizing things and
that she structured
experiments to avoid involuntary
cues from his
examiner).
But today Alex was being recalcitrant.
Dr. Pepperberg had been away
for three weeks at
M.I.T., where she is a visiting
professor this year.
When she leaves him, she
says, Alex chews at his tail
and wing feathers, giving
him a rather threadbare
appearance, and when she
returns he is very
demanding, turning his back
and saying, "Come here!"
"What matter is orange and
three-cornered?" she asked
Alex, holding the tray of
objects in front of him. First,
Alex had to identify which
object was orange and
three-cornered, and then
tell Dr. Pepperberg what it
was made of. She allowed
Alex to pick up the objects
on the tray with his beak
and to "examine" each one.
But after he finished, instead
of giving an answer, Alex
demanded a nut. "Want a
nut," he said clearly, sounding
almost human. (He also responds
to other people's
commands, Dr. Pepperberg's
graduate students for
instance.)
"I know, I'll give you a
nut," Dr. Pepperberg said,
sounding annoyed.
"Wanna go back," said Alex,
meaning go back into his
cage.
Dr. Pepperberg continued
trying to get Alex to perform,
but he resisted and she
began to lose patience.
"C'mon, Alex," she said.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Usually, said Dr.
Pepperberg, that means he is about to give in.
"What matter is orange and
three-cornered, Alex?" she
insisted.
"Wool!" said Alex, getting it right.
Dr. Pepperberg refuses to
call Alex's vocalizations
"language." "I avoid the
language issue," she said. "I'm
not making claims. His behavior
gets more and more
advanced, but I don't believe
years from now you could
interview him." She continued:
"What little syntax he
has is very simplistic.
Language is what you and I are
doing, an incredibly complex
form of communication."
Still, many scientists and
others remain unconvinced.
What about unconscious cues
from the trainer? Perhaps
the most famous instance
of that involves Clever Hans,
a horse at the turn of the
century who could supposedly
count, tell time and make
change by tapping his hoof on
the ground.
It was learned that Hans's
trainer was tipping him off to
the right answer by tensing
his body and moving his
head as Hans "counted."
More recently, Dr. Herbert
Terrace, a Columbia
University psychology professor,
famously repudiated
his own studies in the 1970's
with a chimpanzee he
called Nim Chimpsky, after
the M.I.T. linguist Noam
Chomsky. Dr. Terrace taught
Nim to use signs that
looked as if they were combined
grammatically into
sentences. But it turned
out they were clever imitations
of his teacher.
Asked about Alex, Dr. Terrace
said he thought that
what Alex was doing was
"a rote response." He calls it
"a complex discriminative
performance."
But is Alex thinking? "I
would say minimally," Dr.
Terrace responded. "In every
situation, there is an
external stimulus that guides
his response." Thought, he
said, involves the ability
to process information that is
not right in front of you.
"It shows Alex is a smart
bird," he said. But if you take
away Alex's ability to vocalize
in a way that seems
human, he went on, it would
not seem as impressive:
"The words are responses,
are not language."
On the other side of the
animal-intelligence debate is
Dr. Donald R. Griffin, author
of "Animal Thinking,"
who coined the phrase "cognitive
ethology," the study
of animal cognition. He
believes that animals are
capable of complex thought
and behavior that is not just
instinctive.
The discovery that "a bird
can express his conscious
thoughts and feelings,"
said Dr. Griffin, "is a great
advance.
We used to think that was
impossible." To Dr. Griffin,
Alex's achievements are
just one more proof of his
contention.
Dr. Griffin's views of animal
intelligence have been
hotly contested. "The intensity
of the aversion is
incredible," he said. "It's
a very touchy subject.
Scientists don't like to
be told that a valid reason for
what an animal does is the
possibility that it does it
with any consciousness."
Dr. Steven Pinker, an M.I.T.
scientist and author of
"How the Mind Works," said
that at the heart of the
debate is the question of
human primacy. "In earlier
times the issue was of whether
we are mere animals,
and to separate and exalt
human worth. Ironically, there
has been the same kind of
moralistic return from animal
fans who say we shouldn't
mistreat them because they
think and feel the way we
do."
Dr. Pinker believes that
human beings alone are
genetically programmed to
learn language
spontaneously and easily.
"I think it is rather an ironic
definition of animals to
tend to enoble them by training
them to mimic humans."
Until recently, birds had
been thought of as on the low
end of the intelligence
scale -- hence the term
"birdbrain." The point,
Dr. Pepperberg said, is that
Alex "is a nonmammal, nonprimate,
with a brain the
size of a walnut." And Alex's
accomplishments. she
added, show that "animal
intelligence is more
widespread than we thought."
Dr. Pepperberg attributes
what she calls Alex's ability
to reason and process complex
information to her
training methods. Most training
of birds has followed
the conditioning theories
of B. F. Skinner, the
behaviorist. A bird is taught
to say or do a specific
thing by a human instructor
and is rewarded with food.
Dr. Pepperberg initially
uses the object itself as a
reward so that the bird
associates the word with the
object. She uses two human
trainers instead of one to
demonstrate the interaction
she is trying to teach Alex.
For instance, Dr. Pepperberg
stands in front of Alex
with a graduate student
and orders the student to select
a three-sided orange object
and to say what the object
is made of -- wool, perhaps.
She believes that by watching
the interaction, Alex
connects the graduate student's
response to the
command. "Orange" she believes,
comes to mean to
Alex the color of an object
rather than the immediate
reward of a grape.
Dr. Pepperberg says her experiments
have implications
beyond determining whether
-- or how well -- animals
can think.
She says her methods have
been successfully used to
train autistic children
and children with learning
disabilities. Alex's achievements,
she said, also
underscore the need for
stricter conservation of parrots,
which are an endangered
species.
Dr. Pepperberg, who is 50,
was born in New York
City, an only child who
kept parakeets as pets and
taught them to speak.
She was studying for her
Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard,
she said, when she saw a
"Nova" series on PBS about
chimps' using sign language,
dolphin research and why
birds sing. She wanted to
change fields, but her
advisers discouraged her,
she said, so she continued
her chemistry studies, continuing
nonetheless to read all
she could on animal behavior.
She married and divorced. She has no children.
When she applied for her
first grant to study bird
behavior from the National
Institutes of Health, she
said, "there were reviews
asking me what I was
smoking."
"People are not at all surprised
a chimpanzee can do
this," she went on."You
can't imagine -- people said
birds were stupid."
Dr. Pepperberg expects Alex
to live at least 20 more
years.
Meanwhile, she has added
two new birds to the lab.
Besides Griffin, now 4 years
old, there is Kyaaro, who
Dr. Pepperberg believes
exhibits symptoms of attention
deficit disorder.
"Alex doesn't like either
of them," she said. "Kyaaro is
weird. Griffin is a threat."
Right now she is trying to
train Griffin to do some
of the things Alex can do.
Griffin, who learned the
word "wool" only recently,
has been clinging to it
the way a child clings to a
new-found possession. One
day recently Dr.
Pepperberg held up a purple
plastic letter S and asked,
"What sound is purple?"
Griffin stared at the letter.
But from the other side of
the laboratory Alex made the
sound for him, "Sss."
"Buttinsky," Dr. Pepperberg
said to Alex, and she
turned back to Griffin.
"What sound?" she asked Griffin
again, holding up the
S.
"What sound?"
"Wool," said Griffin.
Griffin has a long way to
go.