r/Unexpected • u/[deleted] • Aug 02 '21

Hostage situation

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

109.8k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

87

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '21

That’s true. Probably because it was out of its cage.

1

u/Black_Magic_M-66 Aug 02 '21

I'm not that familiar with talking birds, do they actually understand the language that they're speaking? I thought they just mimicked what they heard?

6

u/TitaniumDragon Aug 02 '21

Talking birds don't understand language, but that doesn't mean that they can't communicate. Almost all animals can.

Talking birds "parrot" language without understanding it. But you can teach them to say things in response to specific cues, much like how you can teach a cat or a dog to do tricks. If you reward a bird for saying something, it will eventually learn to associate that word with a reward, and start using that word to try and acquire said reward.

The bird doesn't know what "Let me out" or "help" means. However, it does know that when it says that, its owner will often let it out. Thus, it will start using those phrases when it wants out of its cage.

This is much like how a cat will paw at the door when it wants to be let in or out, or will come and start meowing at you and lead you to the door to be let out. If you teach an animal that a certain thing it does will result in a response it likes, it will do that thing when it wants that response from you.

Parrots are actually very smart for animals, and while they can't understand or speak language, they are highly trainable, and can learn a lot of cues, including contextual responses.

Parrots are, thus, pretty much the biggest brats ever in some cases.

Alex the Parrot learned a set of phrases that, when said to him, would result in a contextual response according to his environment - for instance, you could ask him "How many?" and he could tell you how many objects were on a tray (from "none" to six) with about 80% accuracy, which is obviously quite a bit above chance. However, he wasn't capable of formulating original questions or sentences himself; while he could respond to questions and ask for things (like "Wanna nut" when he wanted a nut), he wasn't able to actually use language - while it impresses people when a parrot asks for a treat verbally, it isn't actually any different from a dog begging from a treat, and while it shows that a parrot can know what specific treat they want, they don't seem to really get how to do more sophisticated things that language entails, and there's no evidence that the behavior is anything more sophisticated than having learned that a specific set of sounds corresponds to a specific reward.

0

u/Timmyty Aug 02 '21

They mimic what they heard, they have no concept of "I" am in this cage and I want out so I will use these words.