« PREVIOUS ENTRY
The Flybar 1200

NEXT ENTRY »
Chaos Theory

The parrot that knows “zero”

A while ago, I blogged about the amazing intelligence of Grey parrots — which one MIT researcher claims have “the sentience of a four- to six-year-old child”. Today, I read about some new evidence: A Grey parrot that has developed — entirely under its own steam — an understanding of the concept of zero.

The scientists were playing some counting games with Alex, the 28-year-old Grey in question. After a few days, he got bored with the tests, and started offering a long stream of intentionally wrong answers, apparently because he enjoyed the frustration of the scientists. (Alex is not only smart, but weird, which arguably makes him even more human-like.) Anyway, when he finally agreed to resume the counting tests, he did something that demonstrated he’d evolved a sense of zero.

The tests worked like this: The researchers would lay out a bunch of objects of different colors and sizes, then ask questions like “what color four?” — meaning which color are the objects of which there are four. Alex, as I mentioned, had no problem tossing off correct answers over and over again. But then, as World Science reports …

… one day when an experimenter asked Alex “what color three?” Laid out before Alex were sets of two, three and six objects, each set differently colored.

Alex insisted on responding: “five.” This made no sense given that the answer was supposed to be a color.

After several tries the experimenter gave up and said: “OK, Alex, tell me: what color five?”

“None,” the bird replied. This was correct, in that there was no color that graced exactly five of the objects. The researchers went on to incorporate “none” into future trials, and Alex consistently used the word correctly, they said.

Now consider: The concept of nothingness eluded major Greek philosophers for centuries. Crazy, eh? Chimps and some squirrel monkeys have apparently been able to grasp the idea of zero, but only after being taught it. Though Alex had been taught the word “none” before, as a lack of information or stimulus, he seems to have ported it over to the world numerical quantities all on his own. However, obviously more research is needed here. The scientists want to study Alex further to see if he’s really grokking zero — by getting him to add and subtract small quantities, including zero.

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)


blog comments powered by Disqus

Search This Site


Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

More of Me

Twitter
Tumblr
Flickr


Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

» visit the Collision Detection archives

Clive Thompson's Tumblr
a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

» visit my Tumblr

Recent Comments

Photos

» see all of my photos on Flickr

Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson