It Isn't Dumb
Not just parroting
An African Grey parrot.
Far from just mindlessly repeating sounds they hear, pet parrots may have a purpose for their vocal expressions, including trying to try to track their owners' location, a study has found. While many owners will attest that pet parrots have a purpose in their talking, the subject was little studied before recently. Certainly parrots have shown feats of intelligenceone reportedly formed a concept of the number zerobut most research on captive parrots has focused on lab-reared birds' responses in question-and-answer tasks, scientists say. The new study instead analyzed the types of sounds a parrot decides to make spontaneous, and how these might vary depending on social context. Researchers at the University of Georgia studied hours of videotape of a home-raised, talking African Grey parrot named Cosmo. They noted what they called significant differences in her talking habits, and themes addressed, depending on which people were around her, what they were doing and how far away they were. "Cosmo's vocal production is far from random and is strongly influenced by the context created by variations in her social partner's physical presence and willingness to reciprocate interaction," wrote the researchers, Erin N. Colbert-White and colleagues, in the May issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology. The bird vocalized almost twice much when the owner was in a neighboring room than when the owner was either out of the house or in the same room, they found. "When she and her owner were in separate rooms," they wrote, Cosmo was "significantly more likely" to use utterances involving her spatial location or that of her owner, Colbert-White and colleagues wrote. These included "where are you" and "I'm here." Some of these sounds might thus be an "adaptation of the wild parrot contact call," they addeda type of call birds make when trying to determine the location of out-of-sight flock mates. Moreover, "when her owner was in the room and willing to reciprocate communication, the parrot was more likely to use [sounds] that, in English, would be considered solicitations for vocal interaction (e.g., 'Cosmo wanna talk')," they wrote.
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