Parrot Concepts

01/16/2026

All of us working with parrots and other intelligent animals owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Irene Pepperberg for her groundbreaking work. It's great to see this recognition.

“Bird brain!” What a compliment. 🐦🧠

Much of what we now understand about the intelligence of birds can be traced back to the work of Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Her innovative research in comparative cognition, including her ~30-year collaboration with Alex (the African Grey parrot), transformed our understanding of animal intelligence, communication, and concept formation.

❤️We are thrilled to celebrate the news that Dr. Pepperberg has been awarded the 2025 Division 3 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (APA).

This well-deserved honor recognizes a career that challenged long-standing assumptions, set new scientific standards, and inspired generations of researchers and curious minds alike!

🌟Dr. Pepperberg will be formally honored at the APA Annual Convention (August 6–8, 2026) in Washington, DC—and we couldn’t be more excited to see her extraordinary contributions recognized.

Congratulations to a true pioneer who changed how we see minds beyond our own.💫🏆

12/11/2025

This is interesting, and a good example of animal intelligence, but is not an example of an animal "playing the piano." The octopus is producing sounds, but they are incidental to his purpose of pulling the levers to get the crab. He is not performing actions in order to create an interesting sonic experience for himself. In fact, the octopus may not be able to hear the sounds of the instrument at all since their perception of sound is limited to lower pitches.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

11/20/2025

We agree with this philosophy.

08/07/2025

It's good to see this kind of research getting attention.

Captive cockatoos have at least 30 different dance moves in their repertoire, including headbanging and body rolls, according to a study by Natasha Lubke at Charles Sturt University in Australia, and colleagues, published August 6, 2025 in the journal PLOS One. The moves, of which 17 are newly ident...

07/13/2025

This is a really interesting project. It would be interesting to provide more of a menu of different sounds to choose from and play in various sequences. (We are thinking about building something like that.)

06/10/2025

05/26/2025

Keas are known to be clever troublemakers.

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05/17/2025

Researchers say the avian creatures are as genetically distant from other birds as humans are from other primates

04/11/2025

Quote: "A series of studies published in Science(opens a new tab) in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found."

Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

03/28/2025

Dr. Pepperberg paid a visit to Rébecca’s Kleinberger's lab at Northeastern University. Dr. Kleinberger researches new ways to improve animal welfare and designs tools to give animals more autonomy over their physical and social environments. Dr. Pepperberg shared insights on the past, present, and future of technology in animal cognition research.🎉

03/23/2025

Using a seesaw, a ball and two boxes, researchers have managed to train a group of kea to use touchscreens with their tongues.