Psychology In The News | Parrots Socialise for their Wellbeing

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learnt the value of Zoom and FaceTime as a way of staying in touch with our loved ones when face-to-face contact was too risky. Now researchers have discovered that the value of video chat technology is not limited to humans and that parrots may also benefit from virtual social interaction.

Parrots are naturally social creatures who, in the wild, would live together in large flocks. However, people who keep parrots as pets (there are estimated to be 20 million pet parrots in the USA) tend to keep them alone. This can lead to issues of loneliness and boredom which can result in self-harming behaviours such as feather-plucking. Parrots are also affected by transmissible diseases with ‘avian ganglioneuritis’ affecting 40% of the US parrot population, meaning that ‘in person’ mingling is too risky for vulnerable birds.

In research by Kleinberger et al (2023) participants were recruited from an online educational programme called ‘Parrot Kindergarten’. In total, 15 parrots were first trained to ‘ring a bell’ by pecking it with their beaks. Then, they were taught how to touch a tablet screen to call another bird. These ‘introductory calls’ were part of the birds training and were ended after five minutes or when their attention was deemed to have wandered.

Once the birds had completed this training phase, they were then allowed to call other birds of their own free will by pressing the bell and then touching the picture of the bird they wanted to call on the tablet. Both the bell and the tablet stages were necessary to ensure that the birds were not simply ringing the bell because they liked it, or that they were conducting calls at random. In other words, researchers wanted to be confident that the birds understood the pattern of behaviour they needed to show to intentionally communicate with another parrot. The parrots made 147 unprompted calls in the eight-week study period with video calling available to them for 3 hours each day.

Researchers concluded that the parrots used the video-call technology to socialise, often for the maximum allowed time. Researchers who observed over 1000 hours of video footage found that the interactions of the birds were like those shown in real-life bird interactions (for example, they mirrored one another’s preening behaviour) suggesting that the birds understood that the other bird was ‘live’ on screen. Some parrots also built close friendships, calling their favourite friend more frequently. In addition, some learnt new skills such as singing or flying tricks from their screen-mates.

Caregivers all reported benefits for the well-being of their birds and wanted to continue to provide the opportunity for them to video-call other birds. This research highlights promising ways to improve captive parrots’ psychological well-being.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS!

1. Parrots and their owners were recruited via the online ‘Parrot Kindergarten’, use your knowledge of sampling techniques to explain at least one way in which researchers could have sampled 15 users of this platform.
2. What could be a potential threat to external validity of recruiting owners (and their parrots) from the Parrot Kindergarten platform?
3. The birds were taught to peck the bell and touch the image of another parrot on the screen by their owners using positive reinforcement. Explain how this is likely to have taken place (if you wanted to watch either of the video links below before you do this, this might help you!)
4. The observers analysed over 1000 hours of video footage of the birds using behavioural categories such as ‘preening’ or ‘singing’/
   1. All behaviour was recorded during the 3-hour observation period each day, which behaviour sampling technique was used?
   2. How could researchers have assessed the reliability of their observation?
   3. Should the researchers find that their observation was not reliable, how could they improve the reliability of their observation?

References:

Kleinberger R, Cunha J, Vemuri M and Hirskyj-Douglas I (2023) Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 2023Article No.534 Pages 1–16 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145...

Video: Lonely Parrots Flock Together with Video-Calling Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (accessed 2.1.24)