Saturday, July 6, 2013

Ass is not a fool - BBC

appears cockatoo parrots slightly stupid crows intelligence which scientists love to explore the past 10-15 years, and in fact may well compete with them in intellectual competitions. At the very least, they are able to successfully solve the puzzles associated with the opening of locks, if behind a locked door is a reward in the form of nuts.

group of zoologists from the University of Vienna published in the latest issue of the journal Plos ONE your work with ten untrained Goffin Cockatoo (Cacatua goffini) – they are distinguished from members of the family living in Indonesia, only that They are among the smallest in the world cockatoo, no more than 30 centimeters. Each of them was given the task to get to the nuts, he was hidden behind a transparent door, locked with five locks. The trick was that in order to open the second lock, it was necessary to open the first, third, opened only after the opening of the second, and so on.

This is called consistent resolution of problems, even for a person who is not always an easy task – it requires a special ability to understand the distance to the target and mentally assess the possibility of achieving it.

Rooks know how to use tools and make them

Rooks smarter

Another bird of the family Corvidae was able to use the tools and make your own. Ordinary rook some … ?

What was proposed cockatoos, people probably thought would be pretty fast – at first it was necessary to remove the pin, then remove the screw, then bolt, then turn the wheel 90 degrees, and only then raise the latch to open the door for which was a welcome nut.

Best of all coped with a cockatoo named Pepin – it all about all unaided took less than a hundred minutes. In the four did not work, and the remaining five after tips also achieved the desired result.

«Except for experiments with chimpanzees, such resolution in five steps, each of which requires the commission of various movements, and in these untrained birds, like Pepin, never recorded in animals,” – says Alice Oersperg, senior author of the paper.

Birds are very extensively studied the obstacles in front of his nut.

They looked at them from all sides, touch legs, tried to beak, and that’s what’s interesting: if they were able to uncover some castle in the future they will not experience any difficulties with the disclosure of the same locks. They are well remembered what to do.

The number of birds in the flock has an impact on their social intelligence

Lemurs think together

number of individuals in the population is not able to influence the development of individual intelligence of its individual members, but has an impact … ?

researchers also checked their cockatoo for reflex “Pavlov’s dog” that is trying to understand whether the stupid bird mimic those movements that have already learned, or more consciously move toward the goal. “We have changed the conditions of the problem and made some non-functional locks, false, – says Alice Oersperg. – For example, we removed one of the locks inside the structure, to see whether the cockatoo ignore the unnecessary parts. It was found that the birds notice the change in the sequence of locks and passed most of the non-functional units, even when the castle was oddly mixed puzzle ».

«unexpected and often error-free behavior of these birds, – says another one of the participants in this study August von Bayern – says much about their severe behavioral plasticity and a good memory. In our opinion, the birds of this species are endowed with a strong curiosity, perseverance and desire tactile – beak, claws, tongue – to investigate the subject. Due to the mere visual observation, they would never have identified the moving parts of locks ».

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