What a Parrot’s Mind Adds to Play: The Urge to Produce Novelty Fosters Tool Use Acquisition in Kea

Gyula K Gajdon,Ludwig Huber,Melanie Lichtnegger

doi:10.4236/ojas.2014.42008

Gyula K Gajdon, Ludwig Huber + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4236/ojas.2014.42008

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Abstract

Motivational and cognitive aspects of spontaneous tool-use acquisition in species that do not do so habitually, remain an open but most relevant question. To address this, we studied captive kea (Nestor notabilis), New Zealand mountain parrots renowned for their playful cleverness. The majority of adolescent, but not the adult kea, showed a toddler-like motivation to insert objects into empty tubes and also spontaneously used objects in order to eject food from inside a tube. This parallel what is known from object exploration in large brained mammals and shows for the first time in a habitually non-tool using bird that such a technical innovation is based on object-combining acquired outside the foraging context.

Highlights

The hypothesis that cognition co-evolved with habitual tool-use in large-brained animals [1] is challenged by recent findings
The kea is interesting regarding this question because parrots in general are large brained, kea are renowned for their problem solving abilities [7] but are not habitual tool user, and in contrast to corvids kea and most parrots neither construct nests with twigs, nor do they cache food
Adult male John: Kea John did not combine objects in the 212 actions he directed at the apparatus in the four sessions before he was given a demonstration

Summary

Introduction

The hypothesis that cognition co-evolved with habitual tool-use in large-brained animals [1] is challenged by recent findings. The kea is interesting regarding this question because parrots in general are large brained, kea are renowned for their problem solving abilities [7] but are not habitual tool user, and in contrast to corvids (on which most tool-use studies were conducted in birds) kea and most parrots neither construct nests with twigs, nor do they cache food (putting food items into holes and covering them). Kea lack such predispositions to produce spatial relations between objects both of which are discussed as being relevant to facilitate tool-use acquisition [8]. Some of our captive kea even discovered how to use rods instead of blocks to access food once they had achieved the skill described here [9] (see [10] for Goffin’s cockatoo)

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