Do children and parrots learn numbers the same way?
Irene Pepperberg and other Harvard researchers pursue the answer to this question and others. You won’t hear “Polly want a cracker?” from the beaks of Irene Pepperberg’s parrots. Since she purchased her first African grey parrot, Alex, in 1977, Pepperberg–a 2004-2005 Radcliffe fellow–has taught four birds to speak and some of them to count and categorize. Alex, the oldest, can identify colors, objects, quantities, shapes, materials, and relative size. In learning these skills, the birds’ cognitive abilities compare favorably with those of a four- to five-year-old child. To understand the correlation between the acquisition and comprehension of number labels by grey parrots and children, Pepperberg has teamed up with Susan Carey ’64 and Elizabeth S. Spelke ’71 of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard. When children learn numbers, they learn them sequentially–after two is three, after three is four, and so on–so they get an ordinal sense. The birds, on the other hand, l
