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Concept
Alex (parrot)
Summary
Alex (18 May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds.
Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively. Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human in some respects, and had not reached his full potential by the time he died. She believed that he possessed the emotional level of a two-year-old human at the time of his death.
Animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg bought Alex at a pet store after finishing her PhD in theoretical chemistry, with the intent of studying his cognitive and communicative abilities. She believes that Alex may have had his wings clipped when he was young, which could have prevented him from learning to fly.
Alex's training used a model/rival technique, in which the student (Alex) observes trainers interacting. One of the trainers models the desired student behavior, and is seen by the student as a rival for the other trainer's attention.
Official source
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