Pet Parrots Learn How To Video Call Through A Scientific Experiment

"No Thanks. Please Close This Box!"

YouTube, IFLScience

In our modern world, it’s not surprising anymore to see some animals doing human activities and tasks.

Social Creatures

Unsplash

Parrots love socializing and they usually stay with their flock, but those that were kept as pets become limited in terms of their social, cognitive, and emotional stimuli.

They Need Company

Unsplash

To deal with this, some owners talk to their parrots every day and mimic their sounds to let the parrots know they are heard and understood. However, still, having an interaction with their fellow parrots would be much better and more helpful.

The Goal

Unsplash

A group of researchers attempted to enhance a pet parrot’s social stimulation by training them to engage in video calls.

The First Step

YouTube, IFLScience

The researchers studied 15 birds for three months. The owners first introduced the parrots to using a bell, which would be associated with the bird’s desire to initiate a video call with another parrot.

Choose Your Pal

YouTube, IFLScience

Next, the parrots were taught to touch another bird’s photo on the screen, which associates with choosing which bird to video call with, and these two steps were practiced repeatedly for over two weeks.

Meet And Greet

YouTube, IFLScience

Eventually, the researchers did a “Meet and Greet” to introduce the parrots to one another and assessed if they understood what they saw on screen by observing both positive and negative responses when the other bird appears on the screen – following the bird on screen, or walking away from the device.

The Result

YouTube, IFLScience

The whole process continued to be repeatedly performed until the parrots understood that ringing the bell and selecting a picture on the screen would initiate a video call with another parrot, and after over 147 calls and 1,000 hours of recordings, they finally got the result of the experiment.

The Answer

YouTube, IFLScience

After weeks of hard work, the researchers confirmed that training a parrot using this process would help them learn how to initiate video calls. They also identified a correlation between incoming and outgoing calls – that those birds who would often start a call also got many calls in return.

Watch the interesting experiment about these adorable birds in the video below.

Watch Video Here: