{"id":19725,"date":"2018-03-07T00:45:33","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T06:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/?p=19725"},"modified":"2025-08-14T22:59:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T03:59:01","slug":"inside-dr-pepperbergs-lab-parrots-understand-probability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/inside-dr-pepperbergs-lab-parrots-understand-probability\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Dr. Pepperberg’s Lab: Do Parrots Understand Probability?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"African
Courtesy of Dr. Irene Pepperberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>A few months ago, I wrote about Piagetian liquid conservation, noting that, in order to create experiments for our parrots, I often adapt tasks that were initially designed to examine how children develop various cognitive skills. Sometimes I\u2019m not the one who does the adaptation. As a final paper in one of my courses, a student presented a draft of how we could examine another Piagetian task, one involving understanding of probability. The paper was so good that I asked her to join the lab and carry out the experiment. She\u2014and the birds and other students involved\u2014obtained excellent results, and the paper has recently been accepted for publication (Pepperberg et al., 2018). I\u2019ll provide a brief summary here.<\/p>\n

It turns out that probability is one of the most difficult concepts for humans<\/em> to understand fully. Children have to be about twelve years old before they succeed on some of Piaget\u2019s probability tasks, and even some adults never quite understand probability. (Think about how few people can appropriately solve the \u201cMonty Hall\u201d problem\u2014look it up on the Internet!) We didn\u2019t test Griffin on tasks designed for the oldest children, but rather used those for the 6-8 year olds, given that he matched that age group on the previous conservation task.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Courtesy of Dr. Irene Pepperberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Piagetian Probabilistic Inference<\/h3>\n

The task seems pretty simple: If I put three blue balls and one red one in a bucket, mix them around, grab one in my hand and, while my hand is still closed, ask you what color do you think I have, you\u2019d probably say \u201cblue\u201d. Your reasoning is basically \u201cmore is more likely.\u201d But until children are over 6 years old, they say things like \u201cRed, because it\u2019s my favorite color,\u201d or \u201cOK, you put one red one in and took one out, so it has to be red.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only later do they say things like \u201cBlue, \u2018cause it\u2019s the mostest.\u201d However, if I repeated the task over and over and over and asked the same question again and again, once in a while you\u2019d also say \u201cred\u201d, figuring the draw can\u2019t always<\/em> be blue. At some level, you\u2019d be correct, in that even though there are more blue than red balls, you have no guarantee<\/em> that blue will be drawn, only that it will be drawn more times than red. But how do you actually decide what to do?<\/p>\n

Well, it depends on the number of trials you are given, how well you understand statistics, and what are your goals. For a very small number of trials, most people stick with the majority \u2026 \u201cmore\u201d definitely is \u201cmore likely.\u201d And, if you fully understand statistics, and are betting to win over the course of lots of trials, you should again stick with the majority \u2026 in 100 trials, for example, if you stick with the majority, you will be correct ~75% of the time, and that\u2019s as good as it gets.<\/p>\n

If you are a typical adult human, however, you are likely to try probability matching, or sampling: you guess blue most of the time but try red about 25% of the time, based on the knowledge that red will come up at that percentage (i.e., has to come up some of the time if the draw is not fixed)\u2014but, because you really can\u2019t correctly guess when<\/em> red actually will come up, you won\u2019t do as well as if you stuck with the majority. Still, probability matching is not an awful strategy; it\u2019s a lot better than guessing randomly and makes intuitive, if not statistical, sense.<\/p>\n

Griffin Put To The Test<\/h3>\n

The question was what would Griffin do? Because he could label objects, we gave him essentially the same task as the children, using three of one item and one of another, and asked what the removed, hidden item was likely to be. The picture below shows how we performed the task. We used several different sets of objects (e.g., pieces of cork and pieces of wood, pieces of paper and woolen pompons), and randomly switched the sets and what would be the majority and minority items. We put in lots of controls to ensure that we weren\u2019t cuing him, and gave him 96 trials (the number needed to balance all the different sets and majority\/minority switches).<\/p>\n

He could have used one of three different strategies: (a) choose at random because he had no idea what was drawn (the least intelligent and simplest strategy); (b) choose the majority item 100% of the time (showing that he understood statistics, but in a sense a fairly simple strategy in that he would have just stayed with \u201cmore\u201d is \u201cmore likely\u201d); or (c) try to match the probability, choosing the majority 75% and the minority 25% of the time (not very good statistically, but ecologically sound in that \u201cmore\u201d does not guarantee \u201cmore likely\u201d).<\/p>\n

Griffin’s\u00a0Guesses<\/h3>\n

Interestingly, like most adult humans, and like children about 8 years old, he used (c). He chose the majority 76% and the minority 24% of the time. He updated answers based on the information he acquired from the previous trials, predicting the identity of a sample drawn from a population of a known composition. Such behavior reflects an intriguing form of probabilistic reasoning: He gave more consideration to the hypothesis that the most prevalent object is most likely but also some consideration to the least prevalent.<\/p>\n

Griffin both estimated the distribution of items in the environment and\u2014critically, with respect to full probabilistic reasoning as described by Piaget and Inhelder (1975)\u2014recognized that even a favorable proportion does not guarantee a particular outcome (demonstrating Piaget and Inhelder\u2019s Stage II abilities). Of course, one can argue that (b) is the optimal strategy\u2026but it generally takes a formal course in statistics in order to figure that out!<\/p>\n

Clements, K., Gray, S.L., Gross, B., & Pepperberg, I.M. (2018). Initial evidence for probabilistic learning by a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus<\/em>). Journal of Comparative Psychology<\/em>. .doi: 10.1037\/com0000106<\/p>\n

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1975). The origin of the idea of chance in children <\/em>(L. Leake, Trans.). New York, NY: Norton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To test a parrot’s ability to understand probability, Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s cognitive behavior research lab recently presented African grey parrot Griffin with a task similar to what a 6-8 year-old child might be tasked to do \u2014 using three of one item and one of another, if one item was removed, what was the removed item likely to be? Griffin’s answers might surprise you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":15498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,171,169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behavior","category-everyday","category-new","bird-type-african-grey"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nInside Dr. Pepperberg's Lab: Do Parrots Understand Probability? – Pet Birds by Lafeber Co.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To test a parrot's ability to understand probability, Dr. Irene Pepperberg's cognitive behavior research lab recently presented African grey parrot Griffin with a task similar to what a 6-8 year-old child might be tasked to do \u2014 using three of one item and one of another, if one item was removed, what was the removed item likely to be? 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Read more about the lab at The Alex Foundation Facebook page and at The Alex Foundation Twitter account.","url":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/author\/irene\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44606,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19725\/revisions\/44606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}