When it comes to cognitive testing, the Goffin’s cockatoos at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna are pros.
Researchers have tested them on toolmaking, shape-matching and other tasks, and found that a cockatoo can learn how to solve a problem from watching another cockatoo do it just once.
Now, researchers in Alice M. I. Auersperg’s lab, the home of the Austrian cockatoo colony, have created an experimental setup they call an “innovation arena.” It is a new way to test the ability of animals to innovate, and might be used for a variety of species, in principle. They compared the performance of laboratory-raised cockatoos and wild-caught birds to see if the lab-raised birds had acquired an edge by hanging out with humans.
As the researchers reported May 26 in the journal Scientific Reports, the wild birds were just as smart as the captive birds — but a good deal less interested in bothering with the experiment at all.
The “innovation arena” was a semicircular area with 20 doors, each with a different task behind it to solve for a food reward. The bird might have to push a platform down or a lever sideways. The researchers set up a kind of competition between the lab-raised team in Vienna and the temporarily-captive cockatoos at a field station lab in Indonesia.
The Vienna birds, familiar with experiments and their rewards, dove right in when placed at the starting point.
“They very quickly approach the tasks and wander around and try to open the boxes and get out the rewards,” said Theresa Rössler, a researcher.
But they did not always follow the game plan. Sometimes the birds, both lab-raised and wild, “opened the Wire task in several instances by removing the window hinges (which were closer to the reward) instead of unbending the wire,” the researchers wrote.
The big difference between the two groups was in their interest in doing the tests at all. The researchers classified 10 of 11 lab birds as motivated, meaning they began right away to open doors and look for food. Only three of the eight wild birds were motivated.
But the motivated birds — both wild-caught and lab-raised — performed at the same level in solving the tasks.
Rössler said that if the wild birds “decide they want to interact with the apparatus, they are just as skillful problem solvers.”
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