SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 5 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Pioneering Study Reveals Remarkable Learning Abilities

The blue-bearded macaws, a critically endangered parrot species endemic to Bolivia, have demonstrated the ability to imitate third parties. This phenomenon, previously documented only in humans, involves an observer learning from the interaction between two individuals.

This finding is highlighted in a groundbreaking study conducted by an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Animal Cognition, based at Loro Parque-Animal Embassy, in collaboration with the Loro Parque Foundation. The research reveals that these macaws can learn to exhibit certain unusual behaviours demonstrated by a conspecific in response to specific commands from humans, without any form of explicit training.

Understanding Equivalence and Perspective

The results suggest that these parrots may possess an understanding of equivalence between themselves and others, as well as the ability to adopt third-party perspectives, as detailed by the foundation in a statement.

Biologist Esha Haldar and her colleagues from the comparative cognition research group at the Max Planck Institute in Loro Parque conducted third-party imitation tests with naïve macaws—those without previous experience or knowledge of the stimuli being evaluated.

Experimental Design and Outcomes

In their study, now published in ‘Scientific Reports’, the researchers tested a naive control group that passively observed a demonstrator of the same species performing arbitrary and unusual intransitive actions—actions without an obvious goal and not involving any objects—in response to specific gestural commands from humans.

For instance, they observed another parrot lifting a foot in response to an index finger being raised. Immediately after, the observer was given the same gestural commands by a person and was rewarded for demonstrating the correct response.

In fact, a similar evaluation was conducted with an equally naïve control group, which did not receive third-party demonstrations. The naïve group learned more target actions in response to specific commands and did so significantly faster and with greater accuracy than the control group.

This implies that this species of macaw is capable of learning by observing the interactions of their conspecifics without directly interacting with them, effectively through third-party imitation, summarises the foundation.