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The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots.

2001; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 189; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/00005053-200106000-00012

1539-736X

John D. Newman,

Animal Behavior and Reproduction

Pepperberg, Irene Maxine. The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 446 pp. $39.95. Picture a dapper male, trimmed out in a gray garb, who is very talkative, knows a lot about a lot of things, and is named Alex. "Alex Trebek," you say. Well, yes, but in this case the "Alex" is actually a bird, an African grey parrot, to be precise. In 17 chapters, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Alex's human mentor and scribe, takes the reader through the history of Alex's emergence as a parrot extraordinaire. The importance of this book, however, goes well beyond the demonstration of Alex's abilities to perform cognitive tasks and to communicate intelligently using human-like speech. Rather, it is the author's ability to weave her own work with Alex into the larger world of cognitive psychology that makes this an important contribution to the literature on comparative and cognitive studies. Given the well-documented differences in avian and mammalian neuroanatomy, the studies reviewed in this book provide further evidence for the remarkable convergence of behavioral and mental attributes in birds and mammals. Avian speech? No problem. Number-concept abilities equivalent to those shown in some great apes, such as same-different and larger-smaller? Such seems to be the case. Understanding and use of intention and referential mapping. Yup. Spontaneous intentional creativity, or "babbling"? Indeed. The list goes on, but there is enough here to clearly indicate that a large brain, or similarity of brain structure to that of humans, is not a requirement for intellectual abilities that are at least a match for those attributed to young humans, as well as some other mammals. How was it possible for bird-brained Alex to acquire and demonstrate these abilities? He does not seem to be unique, given that other grey parrots being studied in Dr. Pepperberg's lab also show at least the same early stages of cognitive skills that Alex showed at a comparable stage of training and testing. Rather, the author suggests that the acquisition of speech and speech understanding helps in the development of mental skills that are difficult to achieve without "language," even of this rudimentary sort. Pepperberg credits the use of a model-rival form of interactive training, developed and used in somewhat different form by some ethologists and comparative psychologists, with providing an optimal environment for allospecific (in this case, human-parrot) learning. Out of this training program emerged the ability of the human to teach the parrot in something approaching a pedagogical style. From pedagogy comes structured learning, facilitating the establishment of cultural norms and transmission of concepts from one individual, and generation, to the next. That is how it works for most humans, and that is how it seems to have worked for Alex. The success of Pepperberg with Alex, following a history of earlier, less successful attempts with other methods, suggests that optimal learning depends in large measure on the teacher finding the best approach to teaching. This factor is possibly at least as important as the brain machinery that the student brings to "class." It would be interesting to evaluate the success of a model-rival form of teaching in other animals, to determine whether success can be achieved in a wider comparative context. This author cites cases where this has been attempted, but the examples are few. "The Alex Studies" is organized chronologically as well as conceptually, with respect to Alex's training and successive layers of cognitive skills. The opening chapter relates the long history of human interest in talking with animals, typically in the form of legends that differed between different cultures, such as the ring that supposedly gave King Solomon this gift. This fascination with talking to animals carries forth to this day, as in the wizardly "Parseltongue" (the language used to talk to snakes) in the popular Harry Potter stories. In contemporary studies of animal communication, researchers working with some species have progressed to understanding the meaning of species-typical sounds and in some cases have "talked" with their species by playing back natural or synthetic copies of the species' own communication sounds. This research, although taking us a long way to understanding the communicative significance of natural sounds, has, nonetheless, been constrained by the apparently closed nature of animal communication systems. Pepperberg took another approach, that of teaching her experimental animal to learn to use "humanese" as a means of human-animal communication. This idea did not originate with Dr. Pepperberg, and the first chapter provides an overview of the earlier failures and less frequent successes. But Pepperberg did succeed. Chapter 2 tells how. The next eight chapters review various concepts that Alex has been tested for and the level of his proficiency in each. The ensuing six chapters then focus on Alex's and other grey parrots' vocal behavior, during formal testing and at other times. The final chapter discusses the implications of Alex's data. To summarize, The Alex Studies is not your traditional comparative psychology text but serves as a useful source for a course of studies on this topic, as well as being very readable by anyone with an interest in the use of animals in cognitive science. John D. Newman, Ph.D. Laboratory of Comparative Ethology; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH; Poolesville, Maryland