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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

news.northeastern.edu

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Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#61

Post by RajT88 »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #60
Culonavirus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5 year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.

It's a hyperactive 4-5 year old, with scissors for a face, that never matures. I love having parrots, but they're not at all for everyone, and in many ways make terrible pets.

A friend of mine's mother used to keep parrots, and I remember the biggest and oldest one well (an African grey). I still remember the playful "clip!" sound it would make as I walked past the cage, and it would lean towards me, trying to take a chunk out of me.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#63

Post by outworlder »

johnyzee wrote: post #26

Pretty good forward vision, better than I would have expected. Usuallly (non-predatory) birds turn their head to examine things. Maybe a curved screen would be one idea for better parrot UI.

They have some binocular vision too.

https://parrotjunkie.com/blogs/health/parrot-eyes-anatomy

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#64

Post by swayvil »

tombert wrote: post #7

It feels like increasingly, we're finding that humans are not quite as "uniquely intelligent" as we thought. Don't get me wrong, humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously, but it does seem like we greatly underestimated the intelligence of a lot of others. Birds like parrots and crows in particular continue to impress me when I see them solving increasingly elaborate puzzles, and figuring out how to ope…

From the perspective of humans, humans behave best.

I think that's what we mean by intelligence. Valuable behavior.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#65

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

RajT88 wrote: post #61
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hyperactive 4-5 year old, with scissors for a face, that never matures. I love having parrots, but they're not at all for everyone, and in many ways make terrible pets.

A friend of mine's mother used to keep parrots, and I remember the biggest and oldest one well (an African grey). I still remember the playful "clip!" sound it would make as I walked past the cage, and it would lean towards me, trying to take a chunk out of me.

Yep. The bigger parrots (macaws & large cockatoos) are more like bolt cutters for a face. I used to volunteer at a parrot rescue when I lived near one, we'd feed the hyacinth macaws unopened macadamia nuts. They'd crack the shells seemingly without effort.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#66

Post by KennyBlanken »

Lalabadie wrote: post #20

> Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option. My heart! There's a separate article dedicated to it: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-vid...

And they had preferred friends! It's truly awesome because their owners could help improve their quality of life with just a cheap tablet and the service fee.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#67

Post by watersb »

As with humans and touchscreens, there are potential drawbacks — some familiar (“Participants in our study often emphasized the risk of their birds’ overuse, likening their screen time needs to those of children,” the paper reads); others uniquely avian (“When asked what risks tablet applications could pose to parrots, the most common answer was ‘potential damage to the tablet.’”)

Concerns about "potential damage to the tablet" are not uniquely avian.

The videos seem to show COTS tablets in cases that have been designed for children.

.

COTS: Commercial, Off-The-Shelf; a product that is commonly available for sale, and is fit for use with little or no modification.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#68

Post by yieldcrv »

ethbr1 wrote: post #28
INTPenis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they make a sudden and illogical change to their design.

YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."

“Odd that its 50 year old males in Florida”

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#69

Post by tomjakubowski »

timc3 wrote: post #49
tombert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

“four quarters, ten dimes, twenty nickels, one hundred pennies, five dimes and ten nickels are all equal to the same amount” - only a human could come up with something so unintuitive.

The crows can't believe our foolishness - a single silver dollar is shinier than even a hundred pennies!

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#70

Post by layer8 »

kibwen wrote: post #30
ethbr1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."

Only until enough parrot owners find out about this, at which point parrots overtake the human population of Youtube and the metrics start catering to them.

Just wait until the stochastic parrots discover YouTube…
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