Talking and Reasoning? It’s for the Birds
With an African gray parrot perched on her shoulder, another parked on her index finger and yet another resting comfortably on a nearby chair, Irene Pepperberg makes introductions.
“This is Griffin--he’s 10 months,” she says, nodding at the bird next to her ear. “This one on the chair is Kyo. He’s 5 and he likes a little decaf coffee in the morning.
“And this,” she says of the scruffy specimen clinging to her hand, “Is Mr. A.”
Actually, he’s Alex, the talking parrot. That is, the parrot who actually talks.
He is a feathered prodigy. Over the past 15 years, Pepperberg has documented in scholarly journals Alex’s startling ability to use English words (she prefers to call them “labels”) to communicate his desires, as well as to describe dozens of objects.
Pepperberg, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, has helped convince the scientific world that birds are far more intelligent--and perhaps emotional--than biologists were once willing to acknowledge.
“Intellectually they’re like 5-year-olds,” Pepperberg says, placing them on a par with chimpanzees or dolphins. “Emotionally, these birds are like having a perpetual 2 1/2- to 3-year-old child.”
But this morning, in the basement laboratory where Alex lives with Griffin, Kyo and an assortment of parakeets, he is more interested in meeting people than in boldly going where no parrot has gone before.
He sidles across a table to size up a visitor, cocking his head this way and that. When he nibbles experimentally on a visitor’s Manila folder, he’s offered a business card as a substitute. A research assistant asks, “What matter?” (meaning, “What’s this made of?”).
“Paper,” Alex croaks before busily shredding the card with his powerful beak.
Later, he announces, “I want cork.”
The assistant fetches a cork (“It’s avian chewing gum,” Pepperberg explains) and again asks Alex what it’s made of. When he answers correctly, he’s given the cork, which he grabs with one foot and pecks to pieces.
“He knows 50 different objects, food labels and materials,” says Pepperberg, 47. “He knows seven colors and five shapes, and he knows quantities up to six. He knows same and different and relative size, and he knows concepts of category.”
She guesses he has about 100 words in his vocabulary, using them with about 80% accuracy.
These impressive claims are backed by thousands of hours of teaching sessions, in which Pepperberg and her assistants have recorded how Alex learns to use new words.
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Until recently, the prime directive of ethology (the study of animal behavior) was that researchers not anthropomorphize their subjects. You could not say, for example, that an animal had consciousness or feelings, because those were assumed to be exclusively human qualities.
Pepperberg’s work has helped change that. Faced with evidence that many species possess tool-making, problem-solving and even linguistic abilities, Pepperberg says, “People started accepting the fact that animals could process information--that they weren’t simply little automatons.”
Donald Kroodsma, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, praises Pepperberg for gaining insight into how another species’ mind works. “It’s difficult enough to talk to other human beings and understand one another,” he observes.
Kroodsma, who has documented how songbirds listen to and learn intricate melodies from other birds, says birds are much smarter than previously thought.
“I think the more we learn about these animals, the more we learn the differences between us and them are not as great as we thought,” he says.
Pepperberg, for one, would agree. For instance, one supposedly exclusive human trait is a “theory of mind”--the ability to fathom what another person or creature is thinking, she explains.
Alex may be demonstrating a theory of mind on those days when he answers questions incorrectly and Pepperberg pointedly gets up to leave the room. “I’m sorry,” he calls after her. “Tell me what to say.”
It’s a tough nut to crack, Pepperberg says. “Do I believe a parrot has a theory of mind? Yes. Can I design an experiment that can prove a parrot has a theory of mind? No.” Likewise, she’s sure Alex has emotions, but she doesn’t know how to demonstrate that.
In short, his inner life is a cipher. He may communicate in deliberate ways, Pepperberg says, but “communication is not language . . . we can’t go back into the lab and say, ‘What did you do while we were gone?’ ”
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Pepperberg’s scientific interests date from her Queens, N.Y., childhood, when she raised parakeets. She earned her bachelor’s in chemistry at MIT, then a PhD in theoretical chemistry at Harvard.
Midway toward her doctorate, she grew fascinated with the cognitive research being done with chimpanzees and dolphins. Instead of switching majors, she audited biology and psychology classes and read voraciously.
“I spent 40 hours a week as a chemist and 40 hours a week retraining,” she says.
Meanwhile, she was crafting her own animal intelligence research program. In 1977 she and her then-husband moved to Purdue University in Indiana, where he was teaching neurobiology. Pepperberg secured a small research grant and borrowed some lab space from another scientist.
Alex, bought as a 13-month-old from a Chicago pet store, became her research subject. “I needed an off-the-rack bird,” Pepperberg explains. “I needed to show there wasn’t anything special about my bird.”
Pepperberg chose an African gray because they had already been studied and because they are known for uncanny mimicry. Native to equatorial West Africa, they are intensely social birds that, when bred in captivity, love to be fed and tickled by trusted handlers.
She developed a unique “model / rival” teaching method. In Alex’s presence, she would ask an assistant about an object. If the assistant answered correctly, Pepperberg would bestow praise and a reward.
“We modeled what we wanted him to do, and then we’d ask him,” she says. “At first he couldn’t do it, but then he got it. Once he understood the modeling technique, everything went pretty quickly.”
Pepperberg published her first paper in 1981, reporting that Alex had the functional use of English labels. He could label several objects and was starting to identify colors and shapes. “What was difficult was getting people to accept the work, initially,” she says.
She moved to Northwestern University in 1984 and seven years later accepted a teaching job at the University of Arizona. Meanwhile, Pepperberg expanded her study with Kyo (for Kyaaro, the Hopi word for “parrot”) and Griffin. She hopes to replicate her earlier successes while testing new ideas, like teaching Kyo to count events, rather than tangible objects.
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Working with parrots requires infinite patience of Pepperberg and her assistants. The birds sometimes turn ornery and nip with powerful bills capable of cracking open nuts. And they are not potty trained.
Research assistant Albert Patin presents Alex with a toy yellow cell phone that beeps when its buttons are pushed.
“What toy?” Patin asks. Alex cocks his head. “Cork,” Alex suggests. “Wool.” “Truck.” “He goes through phases where he’ll just list words,” says Patin, who has worked with Alex for two years.
It looks like a contest of wills. Patin shows Alex a small piece of pumice and asks what it is. “Wool,” Alex says. Then Alex has a change of heart. On the second try he says, “Rock.” And now when he’s asked about the toy, Alex says, “Beeper.” He gets a cashew.
Patin shows him a blue cloth ball (“wool,” in parrot parlance). When asked to name the color, Alex eyes it and says, “Yellow.” He tries purple and green. And then, “Buh-looo.”
Pepperberg says Alex has been hard to work with since Griffin joined the flock last summer. She attributes it to jealousy.
She often speaks of her parrots with scientific detachment, and just as often addresses them as a mother would a trio of naughty-but-amusing toddlers. But she insists her affection for the parrots hasn’t clouded her scientific vision. “You can interact with your subjects and still maintain appropriate objectivity,” she says.
Parrots, with 60-year life spans, often outlive their owners. With that in mind, Pepperberg has established a nonprofit organization called the Alex Foundation.
“My goal is to set up an endowment so that when I’m no longer here there will be money to carry on the research,” she says.
