Kea (Nestor notabilis) fail a loose-string connectivity task

[@GoatMilkCookie]

Had a read of the paper, You brought up some very great points! I fully agree with each point you made, and can't wait for more of this type of stuff coming from you!

[@AnimalMindsLab]

Really glad you found the paper interesting! I certainly hope I’ll be able to talk about more papers I’m an author on soon too!

[@GoatMilkCookie]

It was a great read! Although I have a question, with the kea's interest in string, perhaps adding some string to their slide enrichment. Perhaps as a "banister" on the slide itself, to keep the kea interested in the 'slide' part of the slide. a example I made to the best of my abilities: imgur.com/FOPlEw0

[@k.jespersen6145]

Congratulations on your authorship! Also, the paper is very interesting, both in methodology and results. The paper mentioned that the strings became an item of interest and almost a sort of toy/exploratory experience for the kea, even if there weren't tokens on the ends of the ones they pulled. Given that we discussed contexts in which birds did not readily return "stolen" tokens a little while ago, how readily did they let you have the strings back when there weren't tokens? Did there appear to be any analysis of the benefits of keeping a string that could not be traded? (Maybe I need to re-read the paper, if this is answered there, but... did Kati-Bruce still get a chance to exchange for a reward? He had the right idea, and did really seem to be trying.)

[@AnimalMindsLab]

Thank you. They were actually pretty good with returning unrewarding strings. They actually seem more willing to exchange all objects (either rewarding or unrewarding) while they are in the context of being on their work platform, so that might be interesting to look into further. Unfortunately as Kati didn’t manage to retrieve the token in the vertical task, he wasn’t able to get a chance to exchange it. However he did still receive plenty of treats after the experiment finished (as standard we always say “all finished” and reward the birds for participating before removing the work platform or moving away from them)

[@k.jespersen6145]

Another question: Has Loki been involved in tool-use experiments? In the video, it honestly looked like he was thinking, "Token connects to string, string connects to rod, therefore do something with rod to get token." But he would have to be a tool-user to have that sort of automatic lateral thinking, right? And more questions: In the video, some other birds came over into the vertical string-pulling area. Were they observing the work being done? Or were they more likely begging for tokens to trade? If they observed the vertical pulling, would you consider those particular kea naive to the strings, anymore? (Just wondering because other videos have said that kea sometimes learn by watching and then imitating each other.)

[@AnimalMindsLab]

It can be really easy to overinterpret behaviours like this so we have to be really careful. It’s also possible he was simply interested in and investigating the various materials he can cough and interact with. We saw similar behaviour from the other birds during familiarisation, where they were allowed onto the perch without any string attached, and also before the other birds started pulling the string up, Loki just took a little longer before he figured out the method for retrieving the token. The other birds often hang around while we’re working with another bird, but it tends to be that they are more interested in how to get into our food pouches while we’re distracted. I wouldn’t say they got enough experience observing the other birds to no longer be considered naive to using strings.

[@laogewang1322]

It seems like, after all, Keas just try to play with everything movable and being naughty. It is still far away from being intelligent... Is that right?

[@GoatMilkCookie]

No, they are Intelligent, This test was done with crows too, and Previously had similiar results, I believe myself that there is further work at play here, and that if the material was changed then the test would have different results, the paper has said that they have been able to tell the difference between connected and unconnected wood, So I believe what's happening is that they are currently more interested in the string itself more than the prize. Other tests have been performed on Kea before that have shown they are indeed intelligent, this test seems to either be an outlier, or shows that bird brains are more complex than we currently think.