INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence in parrots comprises a wide range of skills including learning, problem-solving, applying knowledge, profiting from the skills of others and integrating all of these processes. Collectively they contribute to generalpurpose skills in a complex environment (Pepperberg 1999). Intelligence is most beneficial in extreme generalist species adapted to exploiting continually changing environments. Parrots encounter novelty daily, and habituate or adapt in order to survive (Byrne 1995). Pepperberg (1999) conducted research on the communicative abilities of African Grey Parrots to answer the question, ‘Why do these birds have such abilities?’ A parrot's capacity to learn is based on an existent cognitive architecture or neural framework in the brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, one wonders what selection pressures shaped such an architecture and in particular the behaviour of African Grey Parrots. Humphrey (1976) proposed that intelligence in primates is a correlate of having a complex social system and a long life. It is the outcome of a selection process favouring animals that can remember and act upon knowledge of detailed social relationships among group members. More generally, Rozin (1976) defined intelligence as flexibility in transferring skills acquired in one domain to another. Thus, long-lived parrots existing in complex social systems, not unlike those of some primates, use abilities honed for social gains to direct other forms of information processing. Parrots are able to distinguish non-predators from predators or poisonous from healthful foods, to recognise and to remember environmental regularities and to adapt to unpredictable environmental changes over an extensive lifetime.

CATEGORICAL CLASSES

Parrots’ ability to form categorical classes (to recognise and place items into groups, for example, ‘food’ or ‘unnatural objects’, or according to colour, shape, texture and number) is accepted and is a basic capacity for survival. So studies on the formation of categorical classes must take into account the ecological and ethological framework of the animal that is being studied, including the niche in which the subject lives and its species-specific behaviour pattern (Pepperberg 1996). Results must be interpreted within this same framework. Some seminal studies have determined the abilities of parrots to form various classes outside their natural domain.