Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/03/20/parrots-playing-tablet-games/

by micquigley0318 • 2 years ago

317 161 2 years ago

news.northeastern.edu

jebarker• 2 years ago

I'm glad the parrots are helping researchers understand tablet games.

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

gamification =?= psittacinification

abruzzi• 2 years ago

My pet Mitred Conure (Leonard) loves to mess with my iPad while I'm reading. On the other had, Leonard >hates< my iPhone. If he's on my shoulder he'll engage in a agressive display waving around and violently biting my shirt. If the phone is close enough to him he will attack the phone. I'm an extremely light phone user so its not like I ignore him when using the phone, but I do expect it is the size makes it competition for his bonding with me.

jader201• 2 years ago

Sounds like we could all be better off having Leonard around!

amatecha3• 2 years ago

I have a family member with a cockatoo (goffin) and it's generally afraid when someone has a phone in their hand. Pretty strange, we haven't figured out exactly what the issue is. Placing the phone down on a table to play some music seems fine, but it seems like once the phone is in someone's hands and moving around, maybe it resembles some kind of predator?? No clue!

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

Polarization of the screen might look super psychedelic (especially if moving) to a bird’s more advanced optical system?

rzimmerman• 2 years ago

We have a budgie (parakeet, a very small bird) that is obsessed with phones. Honestly anything reflective gets him going, but if you even reach for your pocket to pull your phone out he flies to you.

He just flirts with the phone and I haven't seen him try to use it. But if we put a picture of another budgie on the screen he will give it a gentle kiss. He's not as smart as some of these big birds, but there's a lot more depth than I would have ever expected. He has different phrases he uses for different people, and even a set that he exclusively says to videos of himself on an iPhone.

hbossy• 2 years ago

Some birds can see magnetic fields.

davidmurphy• 2 years ago

Does it have FaceID? Could it be the sensors emitting things bothers the birb?

amatecha3• 2 years ago

Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4

cracoucax• 2 years ago

Actually much more impressive than the research videos, he clearly knows his way around youtube

INTPenis• 2 years ago

Until they make a sudden and illogical change to their design.

crooked-v• 2 years ago

And on top of that, can obviously recognize parrots in the video thumbnails.

numbers• 2 years ago

Wow, so impressive that the parrots knows how to minimize the video and browse for other stuff.

Loughla• 2 years ago

I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately impressive to me.

That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube.

It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.

zvmaz• 2 years ago

Incredible!

So much that is fascinating about non-human animals. I can't resist but think that there's a deep similarity between us, and them. One that we even don't suspect. Reminds me of Tom Regan's words:

"Animals have a past, a story, a biography. They have histories. Mink and bears, elephants and dolphins, pigs and chickens, cats and dogs: each is a unique somebody, not a disposable something."

Voultapher7• 2 years ago

We can't prove or disprove that enslaving and exploiting animals is a bad thing. As a society we currently answer that with .. take a look at your supermarket. What if we are wrong?

bdw5204• 2 years ago

I love how the parrot has no patience whatsoever for ads and cable news. If more humans were like that parrot, Youtube would be a much better platform.

vasco• 2 years ago

I was going to make a joke about PMs at Google looking at product experiment results based on parrot engagement - but I'm not sure their work would change at all actually, and that might be the joke about Google product development.

spaceman_20202• 2 years ago

Always weird to me how parrots and crows evolved to be so much smarter than the rest of the birds

There is a small park right outside my house and I constantly see crows just clowning around on other birds. I’ve seen them harass eagles just for fun and casually take food from pigeons.

xattt• 2 years ago

Was this the form of intellectual superiority that Homo sapiens flaunted when they were among “dumber” apes?

leokennis• 2 years ago

Buy this parrot YouTube Premium! I don't know the exact species of parrot this is, but if it has a lifespan of 25 years, a 1 minute ad is like a 4 minute ad for them. Just imagine sitting through that!

xandrius3• 2 years ago

Adblock would do the same without supporting these nefarious monetization techniques.

theCodeStig3• 2 years ago

It's an Indian ringneck parakeet (aviculture name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-ringed_parakeet

sph• 2 years ago

I envision a world where we discover that some of our pets enjoy tech like us, but we try our hardest not to brainwash them with ads for humans.

In this world, some of us humans try to fail Turing tests on purpose to get access to ad-free tech designed for pets. Yes, Google, I am a parrot, why?

nabakin• 2 years ago

The original video https://www.instagram.com/insta.beakk/reel/CtIzWvDgWzX/ and there are more of him

amatecha3• 2 years ago

Thank you! I've been trying for ages to find where this video was ripped from (as the link I found was very obviously not the original source)!

tombert3• 2 years ago

It feels like increasingly, we're finding that humans are not quite as "uniquely intelligent" as we thought.

Don't get me wrong, humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously, but it does seem like we greatly underestimated the intelligence of a lot of others. Birds like parrots and crows in particular continue to impress me when I see them solving increasingly elaborate puzzles, and figuring out how to open windows and the like.

Also I just think parrots are cute.

tocs3• 2 years ago

humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously

I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

nicklecompte3• 2 years ago

Orcas are smart enough to give each other distinct names and seem to understand the concept of verbs/nouns when identifying human words[1]. They could very well be smarter than us, but they'd never dominate the planet technologically: their flippers have no evolutionary path to developing fingers and thumbs.

[1] Some people point out that we've never learned orca language but they've learned ours. This is true, but it's also true that orca scientists have never kidnapped human children and intentionally tried to teach them orca language. So it's more of a poetic comparison than a scientific one.

0823498723498723• 2 years ago

https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002909064/page/84/mode...

(1658) > Loqui vero eos easque posse, Iavani aiunt, sed non velle, ne ad labores cogerentur : ridicule me hercules.

"Indeed, the Javanese say that [the Orang-utans] are able to speak to them, but they do not want to, lest they should be forced to labor (pull the other one it's got bells on)"

tombert3• 2 years ago

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident.

It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way.

It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends on how you measure it. I am pretty sure I could teach a seven year old child that four quarters, ten dimes, twenty nickels, one hundred pennies, five dimes and ten nickels are all equal to the same amount. I don't even think that a seven year old human child would struggle with that terribly; I'm pretty sure I knew that five one-dollar bills was the same thing as a five dollar bill at that point. I don't think any other animal is capable of making those equivalencies though; I am pretty sure that a crow could not be taught this, no matter how hard you tried.

Now, it's entirely possible that assigning weight to this is demonstrating bias towards human concepts; this stuff might be obvious to humans because humans invented it, and thus comparing human and non-human ability in terms of human creations might be an entirely malformed premise. I know nothing about neurology or philosophy (or really anything outside cartoon trivia), so this is just kind of "gut feelings" on my end, which I will admit that that's not very firm ground to stand on.

the_cat_kittles• 2 years ago

i think it depends how you quantify it. seems like there are many other species that might have things worked out better than we do

swayvil• 2 years ago

From the perspective of humans, humans behave best.

I think that's what we mean by intelligence. Valuable behavior.

katbyte• 2 years ago

It’s easier to kill animals and destroy their habit when you think less of them and presume them to have little to no intelligence or emotion (or so little it doesn’t count)

aftbit• 2 years ago

Just leaving this relevant SMBC here:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2867#comic

krunck• 2 years ago

"Seventeen completed the study; three dropped out after showing slight signs of aggression or a lack of interest during the training period. "

Avian rage-quitting? So it's not just humans... I feel better now.

I_Am_Nous2• 2 years ago

Rage quitting or issues with rage WHEN quitting? I can imagine a game-addicted bird might get upset if you turn off the tablet or remove them from the gaming area. Similar to a toddler throwing a tantrum if you turn off a movie they are watching.

dj_mc_merlin• 2 years ago

Birds totally experience rage at inanimate objects like humans. If an objects get in their way or doesn't behave the way they want for long enough, they'll start smacking it. Vicious and intelligent things.

csours• 2 years ago

"after showing slight signs of aggression"

And we do mourn the loss of the research assistants.

charklet• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Ted Chiang (Arrival) short story "The Great Silence" https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...

mutagen• 2 years ago

My African Grey will engage a bit with the sampler app Keezy. I thought I had video of it on YouTube but I can't find it, maybe I never uploaded it.

https://keezy.net/

Thought the sounds would engage him but he's very entertained by the center black button expanding menu on that app. Now I need to make a bird game...

He likes both our phones and our tablets, mostly to chew on but he sometimes engages in weird social ways. He'll let me scratch his head while it is resting on the phone but otherwise not, only my wife gets to scratch his head usually. It isn't a usual one-person-bird bonding thing, I can otherwise interact with him normally, train him, and hang out with him but the head scratching is her time unless there's a phone there.

He also likes my stylus/Pencil but mostly because there's a nice soft tip to destroy on the end.

superkuh• 2 years ago

What a wonderful site design. Everything, even the video clips, work without javascript execution. This is a site that a parrot itself could load and use.

On that topic, I recently saw a video of flocks of parrots that learned to manually spin a water pump windmill by flying up and sitting on the top of it on windless days.

ideasphere• 2 years ago

I thought the exact opposite from a UX angle. Swiped down and it started scrolljacking and then I read the line about touch screens helping us “to snag Lightning deals on Prime Day” and it was enough for me to just stop reading and close the tab.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I hated it but reader mode fixes all.

anymouse123456• 2 years ago

The article looked really interesting, but the scrolljacking made me leave immediately.

seba_dos1• 2 years ago

That's a punishment for enabling JavaScript. As GP stated, it's perfectly usable without JS.

Lalabadie• 2 years ago

Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option.

My heart! There's a separate article dedicated to it: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-vid...

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

And they had preferred friends! It's truly awesome because their owners could help improve their quality of life with just a cheap tablet and the service fee.

spaceman_20202• 2 years ago

Their owners could improve their quality of life by simply not keeping them

Parrots are too smart and too social to be kept in captivity

xandrius3• 2 years ago

Basically enslaved in a prison but with a tablet.

isolli• 2 years ago

It reminded me of a documentary I saw long ago on ape communication (between themselves as well as with humans), and I found that Wikipedia has a rich article on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language

micquigley0318• 2 years ago

There's also this longer-form article about the parrots learning how to read, request music, etc.: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/28/magazine/cockatoo-p...

fy20• 2 years ago

YC S24: Tinder for Parrots

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Are these the same folks that did the parrot videoconferencing thing?

These are cool.

ksenzee• 2 years ago

Yep, same group.

johnyzee• 2 years ago

Pretty good forward vision, better than I would have expected. Usuallly (non-predatory) birds turn their head to examine things. Maybe a curved screen would be one idea for better parrot UI.

outworlder2• 2 years ago

They have some binocular vision too.

https://parrotjunkie.com/blogs/health/parrot-eyes-anatomy

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

They are not really playing games, they are picking at dots appearing at the screen, as they would do with seeds and insects. So is it play a tablet game?

watersb• 2 years ago

As with humans and touchscreens, there are potential drawbacks — some familiar (“Participants in our study often emphasized the risk of their birds’ overuse, likening their screen time needs to those of children,” the paper reads); others uniquely avian (“When asked what risks tablet applications could pose to parrots, the most common answer was ‘potential damage to the tablet.’”)

Concerns about "potential damage to the tablet" are not uniquely avian.

The videos seem to show COTS tablets in cases that have been designed for children.

COTS: Commercial, Off-The-Shelf; a product that is commonly available for sale, and is fit for use with little or no modification.

CobrastanJorji• 2 years ago

Given the science that parrots are extremely social, this evidence that they enjoy calling each other, and the sheer number of wealthy people that own exactly one parrot, I expect that one of you is surely going to launch a social network for parrots any day now, and it will probably make money.

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

Great. Now my parrot goes on Beakbook and within a month he has a timeshare, a reverse mortgage, and three NFTs.

Also his favorite phrases to yell out when company comes over are "The Earth is Flat!", "Vaccines Suck!", and "I'm not flying, I'm traveling."

kylehotchkiss• 2 years ago

This seems like the first step towards building applications that birds will use for real tasks in the future. They probably can solve recapcha/hcapcha about as well as I can by now.

lambdanil• 2 years ago

It seems it's only a matter of time until we get parrot farms used to bypass captchas.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

Don't leave your parrot unsupervised with gadgets [0]. If they get phone rage...

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/parrot-versus-phone/index.ph...

animal531• 2 years ago

They need a little touch overlay or something for the screen so they don't need to use their tongues?

It's not as if they need multi-touch or other capabilities.

AndrewOMartin• 2 years ago

This is going to drive the accessibility crowd wild. Yeah, right now only a small number of your users are Parrots, but that would grow if they were properly catered for.

Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

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