Scientists have proven that parrots are smarter than three-year-olds

The results of the latest research.

The Goffin cockatoos in nature, using tools, and does not produce them, but in laboratory conditions demonstrate amazing abilities, on the go inventing ways of solving tasks that require the use of relatively sophisticated tools. In the new experiment, cognitive biologists of the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of veterinary medicine have proven that cockatoos possess spatial thinking and have an intuitive idea of similarity and symmetry.

The animals have to choose the subject so that it was in the hole of complex shape. Kakadu is not just coped with the task; to place the object in the hole, they took less attempts than many primates.

The ability to find the correspondence between the form of three-dimensional objects requires the person in many everyday and professional tasks: insert the key into the keyhole, select the screwdriver — all these actions require skill that begins to develop in the first years of a child’s life. The development of this seemingly simple skill requires the emergence of allocentrically point of reference, in other words, the ability to assess the spatial position and shape of objects that are different from one’s own body. The development allocentrically coordinate system in children precedes the development of skills in the use of guns.

Other important aspects of the job on combining form of the concept of symmetry and the like. To insert the disc into a round hole is easy, difficult to cope with asymmetrical or not symmetrical on all axes object. Insert the ball into a round hole can infants aged one year; to deal with the square hole and the cube, leaving another 12 months. At the age of 3-4 years children begin to rotate the objects and estimate their shape before you decide what hole they will fit. Higher primates such visual assessment is already incapable.

Austrian scientists have used a transparent box with non-symmetrical hole in one of the walls. To get a treat, the parrots had to choose a figure suitable shape and insert it into the hole so that the figurine ended up in the box without any prior training. Kakadu almost immediately found a bunch of figures right to the hole and after a few attempts to insert it almost always succeed. Shapes shapes and holes was quite difficult — from the balls to the pyramids and crosses.

This proves that the cockatoo the Goffin allocentrically own coordinate system, similar to that which develops in humans toward the end of the second year of life, explain the authors of an article published in the journal PLоS ONE.

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