Parrots can imitate meaningless behavior almost as well as humans – Ars Technica
When it comes to meaningless gestures, macaws try to follow the crowd.
There have been many studies on the capability of non-human animals to mimic transitive actions—actions that have a purpose. Hardly any studies have shown that animals are also capable of intransitive actions. Even though intransitive actions have no particular purpose, imitating these non-conscious movements is still thought to help with socialization and strengthen bonds for both animals and humans.Zoologist Esha Haldar and colleagues from the Comparative Cognition Research group worked with blue-throated macaws, which are critically endangered, at the Loro Parque Fundación in Tenerife. They trained the macaws to perform two intransitive actions, then set up a conflict: Two neighboring macaws were asked to do different actions.What Haldar and her team found was that individual birds were more likely to perform the same intransitive action as a bird next to them, no matter what they’d been asked to do. This could mean that macaws possess mirror neurons, the same neurons that, in humans, fire when we are watching intransitive movements and cause us to imitate them (at least if these neurons function the way some think they do).Parrots are already known for their mimicry of transitive actions, such as grabbing an object. Because they are highly social creatures with brains that are large relative to the size of their bodies, they made excellent subjects for a study that gauged how susceptible they were to copying intransitive actions.Mirroring of intransitive actions, also called automatic imitation, can be measured with what’s called a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) test. These tests measure the response time between seeing an intransitive movement (the visual stimulus) and mimicking it (the action). A faster response time indicates a stronger reaction to the stimulus. They also measure the accuracy with which they reproduce the stimulus.Until now, there have only been three studies that showed non-human animals are capable of copying intransitive actions, but the intransitive actions in these studies were all by-products of transitive actions. Only one of these focused on a parrot species. Haldar and her team would be the first to test directly for animal mimicry of intransitive actions.The researchers trained seven macaws to perform two intransitive actions. The birds responded to “lift leg” and “spread wings” when they saw specific hand signals. They were then divided into a compatible group and an incompatible group.Macaws in the compatible group would receive a reward when they imitated an intransitive action that the bird next to them was directed to perform. Those in the incompatible group would be rewarded with a treat when they saw the other bird perform one action, but they performed the other. Trainers were always behind a curtain so that one bird would not be able to see that the other was being told to carry out an action. Would the feathered subjects mimic each other even when they were not supposed to?“If macaws are indeed susceptible to an automatic imitation effect, the action stimuli matching the response will facilitate the compatible group’s performance, whereas the stimuli not matching the response will hinder the incompatible group’s performance,” Haldar said in a study recently published in iScience.This is exactly what happened. While birds in the compatible group seemed to have no problem mimicking the same action and made few errors, it took longer for those in the incompatible group to catch on that they had to perform a different action. Many times, a bird would start copying the other bird instead of carrying out the opposite action. When the researchers switched to a neutral “do it now” command instead of specific hand signals, it took even longer for the incompatible group to figure out what they were supposed to do without imitating the action they observed.Whether the macaws’ responses mean that they actually have the same mirror neurons that humans do remains unknown. The way they are susceptible to copying each other, even when told to perform a different action, suggests they might. Regardless of that, they do imitate meaningless movements.“Our findings that parrots are subject to the involuntary copying of intransitive actions imply that… [they] have evolved motor imitation skills and may imitate conspecific gestures,” the research team said in the same study.iScience, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111514Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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