{"id":35209,"date":"2022-06-15T01:42:47","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T06:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/?p=35209"},"modified":"2025-10-08T13:24:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T18:24:25","slug":"inside-dr-pepperbergs-avian-cognition-lab-45th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/inside-dr-pepperbergs-avian-cognition-lab-45th-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Pepperberg’s Avian Cognition Lab Celebrates 45th Anniversary!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"African
Alex, who was picked by chance from among nine other young African grey parrots in a pet store, was with Dr. Pepperberg for 30 years. His passing was covered in news outlets such as the New York Times<\/i> and The Economist<\/i>, which is usually reserved for world leaders, or notables like Pavarotti. Courtesy of Dr. Irene Pepperberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

June 15th<\/sup> marked a very special day this year \u2014 the 45th<\/sup> anniversary of the start of my work with Alex the African grey! The world of avian behavior was very different then. No one believed that birds were intelligent, particularly given their tiny brains that looked nothing like ours. Even the way intelligence was studied was mostly limited to a standard protocol that involved locking a subject in a box and letting it figure out the task by trial-and-error learning (e.g., a red light shines, then a choice of red versus green appears; if red is chosen, initially by chance \u2014 a “match”\u2014 a reward is given but if green is chosen, again initially by chance \u2014 a nonmatch \u2014 a time-out occurs).<\/p>\n

But there I was, a young woman whose Ph.D. was actually in theoretical chemistry, sitting across from a nervous, roughly year-old African grey parrot, in a very small room in the basement of the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University. I believed that parrots were smart and that I could use a then-revolutionary training technique, based on observational learning, to change the way the world thought about a birdbrain.<\/p>\n

The Beginning With Alex The African Grey<\/h3>\n

Our path wasn\u2019t easy. A friend once jokingly said that it was littered with the remains of those who said it couldn\u2019t be done. And it certainly wasn\u2019t done alone. First and foremost was Alex, who was picked by chance from among nine other young African grey parrots in a pet store. He could have ended up anywhere else! My initial co-workers were also so very important. I started with a very few undergraduates, some high school volunteers, and even some other faculty wives who were determined to help me make more of a place for myself at the university than they had managed. Without them, I could not have put my plan into effect.<\/p>\n

I was lucky that a new assistant professor could loan space to me that he initially wasn\u2019t using. And, of course, I\u2019ll never forget the department head, who said that if I could get the dean to agree to let me submit a federal grant without having a faculty appointment (something totally<\/em> against established protocol), he\u2019d let it proceed (he never thought I could do it, but he kept his end of the bargain).<\/p>\n

Of course, there was Dietmar Todt. He had published a short article in a German journal (thankfully in English!) outlining the modeling technique he had used to train a Grey parrot to duet with him. This was the first stage in two-way communication, and the basis for the Model\/Rival observational learning technique that we successfully used with Alex. Even my then-husband who, if not exactly fully supportive, at least initially tolerated the endless hours I spent in the lab rather than with him. And although my first grant came back, literally asking me what I was smoking<\/em> (well, it was the 70s!), reviewers of my second grant thought it was worth giving me a tiny bit of money for a year to see what I could accomplish.<\/p>\n

To say that Alex and I hardly had a fairy-tale existence was putting it mildly. Our lives were often more like the old-fashioned Perils of Pauline<\/em> weekly cinema series, where the heroine endlessly lurches from one crisis to another, leaving the audience to wonder about her survival until the next episode. We dealt with endless moves and temporary positions, losses of grants, and often outright antagonism from colleagues.<\/p>\n

Alex The African Grey Shakes Up The Academic World<\/h3>\n
\"African
Athena, along with Griffin, are carrying on Alex’s legacy with the work they are doing with Dr. Pepperberg. Courtesy of Dr. Irene Pepperberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But, over the years, we persisted. Grants ran out, but then we received both small and generous donations from innumerable individuals. When one position vaporized, we found another. Some colleagues said that birds couldn\u2019t do \u201cX\u201d, so we designed careful, complicated experiments, and Alex showed that the “experts” were wrong. We published paper after paper, and I\u2019ve written about some of his achievements here. He showed abilities comparable to that of a young child, even with a brain the size of a shelled walnut and despite being separated from us by over 300 million years of evolution. He also eventually \u2014 grudgingly \u2014 helped train our younger parrots, after realizing that aiding us was another way to show off his own intelligence.<\/p>\n

When he died after being with me for 30 years, I was totally devastated. The world seemed to mourn with me. His obituary was printed all over the world, most notably in places like the last page of The Economist <\/em>(usually reserved for world leaders, or notables like Pavarotti) and in the New York<\/em> Times. <\/em>The lab received thousands of lettersand thousands more emails and phone calls. Interviews for the media went on for weeks. And that was well before things like Facebook or Twitter.<\/p>\n

A Legacy That Goes Beyond Alex<\/h3>\n
\"African
Griffin has played a key role in Dr. Pepperberg’s research on parrots’ cognitive abilities. Courtesy of Dr. Irene Pepperberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The work continues, supported by our generous donors, with Griffin. It continued for a time with Arthur, and now with the addition of Athena. Griffin has actually exhibited abilities well beyond those of Alex. However, he rarely gets nearly the same level of media attention, probably because he isn\u2019t the “first,” and because many other labs, inspired by our work, have been demonstrating other amazing avian capacities. ‘Tis a bit sad for Griffin, but wonderful for the field!<\/p>\n

In any case, Griffin, Athena, and sometimes two pet birds, Pepper and Franco (who belong to a couple who have worked in the lab), have demonstrated several advanced capacities. I\u2019ve written about many of their exploits<\/a> here. Needless to say, we should no longer consider the term birdbrain an insult!<\/p>\n

We hope to continue our research, with the help of our donors (on whom we now exclusively depend!), for the foreseeable future. In the short-term, I plan to work with my research assistants to see how Grey parrots respond to further studies involving various forms of logic, exclusion, optical illusions, contrafreeloading (working for rewards that could be obtained for free), and auditory perception. In the long-term, I plan to hand the reins over to my post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Suzanne Gray, who intends to pursue a faculty position. She will continue some of these projects and continue working on and developing numerous ones of her own.<\/p>\n

So, hopefully, 45 years from now, Suzanne will be writing something akin to this missive. Describing her life with Grey parrots \u2014 presumably with fewer hiccups than I\u2019ve had along the way \u2014 thanking large numbers of people for their assistance and explaining how she plans to turn over the reins to the next generation.<\/p>\n

You can help Dr. Pepperberg continue the groundbreaking parrot research she began 45 years with Alex, the African grey parrot who won admirers from around the world with his cognitive abilities. The Alex Foundation has a \u201cDonate\u201d button linked to PayPal. Visit http:\/\/alexfoundation.org<\/a>\u00a0and click on the \u201cSupport Us\u201d link for more information.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Alex Foundation celebrates a special milestone this week \u2014 the 45th anniversary of when Dr. Irene Pepperberg began her groundbreaking collaboration with Alex the African grey! In this very special blog, Dr. Pepperberg takes us back to the early days of convincing others that parrot intelligence was worth studying and redefining the term birdbrained. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":35212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behavior","category-editor-choice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDr. Pepperberg's Avian Cognition Lab Celebrates 45th Anniversary! – Pet Birds by Lafeber Co.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Alex Foundation celebrates a special milestone this week \u2014 the 45th anniversary of when Dr. Irene Pepperberg began her groundbreaking collaboration with Alex the African grey! 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You can help Dr. Pepperberg continue the groundbreaking parrot research she began more than 30 years ago with Alex, the African grey parrot who won admirers from around the world with his cognitive abilities. If you shop online through sites such as Amazon.com, you can designate the Alex Foundation to receive a percentage of your final sales, or register with the Alex Foundation at iGive.com and a percentage of sales from companies associated with iGive will go to the foundation. The Alex Foundation also has a \u201cDonate\u201d button linked to PayPal. Visit\u00a0The Alex Foundation\u00a0and click on the \u201cSupport Us\u201d link for more information. 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\/35209","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=35209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45540,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35209\/revisions\/45540"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}