User:Faithschulz

Irene Pepperberg

Irene Pepperberg (born 1949), in Brooklyn, New York City, New York is an American researcher focused in studying cognition and communication of Grey parrots. In Brooklyn, as an only child she began to keep parakeets and even taking one to the Massachusetts Institution of Technology during her bachelors in 1969. After her bachelors in Chemistry, she would go to Harvard University to receive her masters and doctorate in 1971 and 1976.

Research

Pepperberg's interest in interspecies communication first came from seeing an informative television show about a chimpanzee that communicated with humans through sign language. After being inspired, Pepperberg bought an African Grey parrot named Alex, who became known for his intelligence. Alex understood English labels to describe objects, colors, shapes, materials, simple math, and even concepts such as "none", "same/different", "bigger/smaller". Alex's intelligence was often compared to a four year old child, playing a fundamental part in Pepperberg's research of interspecies communication.

Understanding how interspecies communicate was an important feature of Pepperberg's research. She found that the parrots' learning process sometimes would parallel human processing. Pepperberg found that Grey parrots use speech in ways resembling a young child. She also speculated that long-lived birds could be easily compared with primates. For example, long-lived birds with complex social systems often have the ability to get social gains like primates. In order to teach the parrots, Pepperberg used references to work with their comprehension skills. To have a parrot label an object, the parrot will need the object in front of them to associate the label.

In Pepperberg's research, it describes a training system that uses a three-way interaction. With two humans and a parrot, Pepperberg had the parrot observe two humans handling objects and their interaction. One human would ask what the object is, then reward the person by handing over the object. The parrot was to model after that behavior. If the parrot gives an incorrect response, the punishment is taking away the object from sight. What makes this different from other studies is that Pepperberg interchanges the role of trainee and model. The parrots used in this experiment were able to answer all humans, not just the humans who worked along with them.