Brainy Parrots Are Smarter Than Children

• Brainy Parrots Are Smarter Than Children

African grey parrots are smarter than your average two-year-old, according to scientists.

In fact researchers claim to have found that human children only do as well as the parrots from about the age of three.
No other animals apart from great apes match the birds' ability to understand noise-related causal connections.
Researchers tested six African greys housed in a parrot rescue centre in Vienna, Austria.
During a series of experiments, the birds were asked to choose between two closed boxes, one of which held a piece of walnut and rattled when shaken. The other, empty container, could be shaken without making a noise.
The parrots showed they knew how to detect hidden food rattling in a shaken box.
But much more impressively they also worked out -  almost instantly - that if a box was shaken and made no noise, the food must be in the other container.
Choices were made by a parrot walking over to a box and turning it over with its beak.
In similar tests, most animals - and even small children - get confused about the way shaking and noise relate to the presence or absence of a hidden reward.
The scientists, led by Dr Christian Schloegl, from the University of Vienna, wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: "Human children solve this task from an age of three to four years, and the birds' success rate was comparable to those of the three-year-olds."
The parrots could not be tricked by playing them recorded sounds of a box rattling, said the researchers.  If a box was not shaken at the same time, it was ignored.

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