Are parrots naive realists? Kea behave as if the real and virtual worlds are continuous
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Human psychology and animal cognition have increasingly used virtual stimuli to test cognitive abilities, with the expectation that participants are ‘naive realists’, that is, that they perceive virtual environments as both equivalent and continuous with real-life equivalents. However, there have been no attempts to investigate whether nonhuman subjects in fact behave as if physical processes in the virtual and real worlds are continuous. As kea parrots have previously shown the ability to transfer knowledge between real stimuli and both images on paper and images on touchscreens, here we test whether kea behave as naive realists and so expect physical processes to be continuous between the physical and virtual worlds. We find that, unlike infants, kea do not discriminate between these two contexts, and that they do not exhibit a preference for either. Our findings therefore validate the use of virtual stimuli as a powerful tool for testing the cognition of nonhuman animal species.
Bastos, A. P. M., Wood, P. M., Taylor, A. H. (2021) Are parrots naive realists? Kea behave as if the real and virtual worlds are continuous. Biology Letters, 17(9), 20210298. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2021.0298
Link: royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
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And on to the next challenge: only using a laptop; can a wild Kea teach a zoo Kea how to pull the windscreen wiper rubbers off a Toyota Corolla?
They are just about ready to use Zoom. Then the fun will start. By the way, we mix our virtual and our real hands. There is always an alternative to your hypothesis. That is that they do what they believe you expect them to do.
OK, that's amazing! Would never have thought to test for this, and it does indicate a lot about how kea might interpret their world. Is this form of mental modeling similar to the one that Animal Minds was testing dogs for with the obscuration of a person patting a false dog model? It seems to imply the same sort of imagination of object persistence. Looking forward to reading the paper, especially the experiment to remove confounding variables. Kea seem like they might be able to learn to distinguish between virtual and real, with enough repetitions of that set-up.
@AnimalMindsLab
2 жыл бұрын
It is a similar type of mental representation, yes. In that study we were asking the dogs to imagine events and actions they couldn’t see (the owner petting the hidden dog) whereas here we are only asking them to remember to location of a hidden object. Keeping track of objects that are out-of-sight is known as object permanence. The important part of this study for us is that it validates being able to use touchscreens in future kea studies, and shows that kea treat them as if the stimuli on the screen are real. It is possible with further experience of touchscreens that they will learn to distinguish virtual and real, but that is a question for future research.
Really do adore the bird life here in NZ.
I wonder why they didn't use resistive touchscreens (can detect touch from any object) instead of capacitive touchscreens.
I think it's not a good test, you kept giving the birds the ball that came from behind the screen , and giving them food if they choose the right virtual box. Now maybe they cant make the difference, OR they can, but they know they'll get the reward anyways if they pretend it to be real...
@AnimalMindsLab
2 жыл бұрын
That's exactly right! We then pitted real and virtual stimuli directly against each other in another experiment. If kea were just "pretending" that the real and virtual worlds were continuous and equivalent but did not actually perceive them as such, in this follow-up experiment they should select the real option above chance. They didn't, however, suggesting that they really did see the two as equivalent. Send an email our way and we can send you the paper if you'd like to have a look in more detail!
It would be interesting to see whether the results would be the same for 19 month old infants if they controlled for their caregivers use of electronics. Maybe the infants are only mimicking other peoples differing levels of interest between real and screen stimuli. Also it would be good to to see whether the kea still believe in a continuous virtual and real world after a test the only gave a reward in either a real of virtual space, and then test whether they still perform the same way in a different mixed reality test. I guess I wonder how much is associative conditioning and simple probing, and how much is this belief.
thanks for the obnoxious music
I do wonder - babies already have more experience - is it possible that by showing them examples of the two worlds connecting you biased them, in a way your babies have already been biased against?
Does this suggest that they can't perceive the difference between virtual and physical or that they are able to use their imagination?
@Prometheus4096
Жыл бұрын
It likely means they are not intelligent enough to recognize that the virtual world is not the real world. The only counter to that would have to be that they are smarter than human infants and that they do perfectly realize it, but that they also realize that it is a test, and they just do what gets them the reward.
This was unfair to the Keas. They're born at the mountines in the snow. They're the only parrots that eat meat. Let us not compare them with our unfortunated infants, who are being laid of with a help of modern entertainment, so the parents could feel young again (or still?)... Humans are nowadays growing with touch sreens, give Keas a year and they'll crack it too. ;)
@AnimalMindsLab
2 жыл бұрын
Absolutely - the next step is to establish if, given more experience of the real and virtual worlds, kea do start to perceive them as being discontinuous, and if so, how much of this experience is required. It seems that in humans this might be far less than it might be for kea, but we want to establish this properly with further research.