'Do I know you?' Captive kea can pick out pix of their friends

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-06-21 09:01

New Zealand; International

PHOTO: Daniel Buckle/Unsplash

European researchers worked with a flock of kea living in an outdoor aviary to see if the cheeky parrots could distinguish between pictures of familiar and unfamiliar human faces. Birds were presented with two faces on a touchscreen, one of them being a human who had been in regular close contact with the kea over the past 5 years, and the other an unfamiliar face. If a kea chose correctly according to its assigned group, the bird would get a tasty reward. After nine months, most kea were able to learn how to tell the difference. The researchers say this ability to differentiate puts them in line with great apes and pigeons.

News release

From: The Royal Society

The study at hand, addresses the question whether a lab population of kea parrots (Nestor notabilis) were able to apply the concept of familiarity to differentiate between human faces in a two-choice discrimination task on the touchscreen. The results illustrated that the lab population of kea were indeed able to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces in a two-choice discrimination task. The results provide novel empirical evidence on abstract categorisation capacities in parrots while at the same time providing further evidence of representational insight in kea.

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Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Veterinary Medicine, Austria; Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Germany; Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany; Leibniz-Science Campus Primate Cognition, Germany; University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria

Funder: N/A

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