He could understand concepts like colour and numbers, textures and shapes. He could actually talk to you, not, as other parrots do, just recite words of phrases they had heard somewhere back to you. You could say something like "Alex, what is this?" holding up a blue cube and he would reply with 1 blue square. He could also do basic addition. I may have done a whole report on him this year
The only thing they did to him was teach him, they didn't inject him with stuff or anything, they just wanted to see how intelligent these birds could be with the right training. When he wasn't in training he was basically a pet. (I've seen videos about him)
I did a school assignment on him this year, from what I saw he was very well looked after, he even learnt how to ask for specific things he wanted, and they always gave it to him to reinforce the learning and asking. He learnt how to ask for things, ask to go to places, and intellectual things like that. Just like proxxxy said, it was not scientific experiments, it was lingual and intellectual experiments
That seems kind of stupid. Having a parrot be able to call a blue square a blue square, and pick a blue square out of a selection of objects does not prove it knows that it is a square and that it is blue, it just associates the image of a blue square with the sound "blue square"
That's how humans learn language too, your parents hold a ball to your face while saying "ball" and then you eventually learn that that noise is indicative of that object. Just because he doesn't have a complex understanding of language doesn't mean he isn't learning language.
Exactly, how else do you learn? You here other people saying the word and using the object, so you begin to associate the two. That's how everyone learns... And by the way, Alex did know shapes, he could be asked to count the points on them or asked 'whats the object with four points' and he could say the square
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· 9 years ago
Alex was a parrot that learned to speak and actually understood what he was saying. For example, if you had some random objects and asked him to pick the blue cup, he could do it.
it's called Alex and Me, by Irene M. Pepperberg