A parrot outsmarts Harvard students in memory games
They are pretty, clever and can also talk back to you. African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) can live more than 50 years, memorize dozens of words in English and, if given the chance, outsmart a flock of Harvard students in a classic Shell Game. Actually one did.
A parrot called Griffin has humiliated students at Harvard University, as well as local children, by beating them in a memory test.
Harvard researchers compared human memory skills with those of the African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) – an animal separated from humans by more than 300 million years of evolution.
They compared how 21 Harvard undergraduates and 21 six-to-eight-year-old children performed against the 22-year-old bird Griffin in several rounds of a classic shell game.
The game required mentally tracking the locations of fluffy pom-poms hidden under cups that swapped places a number of times.
Griffin’s accuracy was comparable to, and in some rounds slightly better than, human adults over 12 out of 14 different rounds of varying difficulty.
The parrot also demonstrated a performance better than chance and outperformed children across all conditions.
Well, here’s one bird that Ivy League students should be wary of.
New Zealand is home to some very unique parrots including the kea, kaka and kakapo. Keas are large, intelligent parrots that live in alpine areas of New Zealand’s South Island. They are the world’s only alpine parrot and are known for their curious and sometimes cheeky behaviour near ski fields where they like to investigate bags, steal small items and damage cars.