Two for the road
Except during Pepperberg’s first year back at MIT, Alex has accompanied his mentor everywhere. And over the last decade, as Alex has approached middle age, a few fellow African greys have joined him in the lab to help share the workload.

Alo, who came aboard in 1990 and whose name means "spiritual guide" in Hopi, dropped out after only a few years because she had trouble coping with student turnover, says Pepperberg. She now lives happily with a friend of Pepperberg’s.

Kyaaro, added at the same time, also did not meet expectations. A parrot behaviorist who also works with children diagnosed Kyaaro with attention deficit disorder, says Pepperberg, and he now takes on a lighter load back in Tucson.

In the last few years, two more young trainees have joined Alex. Griffin, now 6 ½, is following in Alex’s footsteps, albeit a little more slowly. With a dozen labels under his belt, he’s beginning to learn his first shapes and colors.

Interpet Explorer
Wart, the ingénue of the group at 3, is the avian star of Interpet Explorer, one of several relatively new experiments Pepperberg is overseeing in the Media Lab, a somewhat unorthodox degree-granting group dedicated to researching the future of society’s interaction with technology.

Essentially a computer set up for a parrot’s use, Interpet Explorer includes a "smart perch" equipped with red and blue paddles as controllers, a 17-inch LCD screen, speakers and a Web cam.

Although the press instantly pounced on the fantastic idea of a Web-surfing parrot--and Pepperberg’s own Web site asks the question, "Could a parrot use the Internet?!?"--that’s not what Interpet is about, she says.

Rather than give parrots a way to, say, order seed treats from www.Lafeber.com when their owners aren’t looking, Interpet’s purpose is to entertain birds so that boredom-and destructive neurotic tendencies such as screaming and featherpicking-don’t set in when owners are away all day at work.

One of the Media Lab’s graduate students, Ben Resner, previously a software programmer at Berkeley Systems, maker of the flying toasters screensaver, is working on several parrot-pleasing computer applications.

They include a video and music browser, a four-note musical instrument, a live video feed of wild parrots and interactive puzzles and mazes. Resner may even eventually develop tools that allow a bird to engage in remote interaction with its owner, much like rover@home, an experimental program already being tried with dogs.

Rover@home lets owners see their dogs over a Web cam, issue commands and even dispense food when the dog requests it by bumping a "mouse" consisting of a flexible stalk with a plastic ball on the end.

It’s all fascinating stuff, but Pepperberg is tightlipped about progress so far in developing computer programs for parrots. The most she’ll allow is that it’s been more difficult than anticipated to come up with an application that will hold a psittacine’s interest.

"They’re good at finding ways to get around us," she says drolly.

See Alex read
In another experiment launched at MIT, Alex reads. Sort of. It’s really more of an attempt to prove that Alex understands the concept that sounds can be recombined to form different words, says Pepperberg. She got the idea for the experiment after hearing Alex rhyme words.

"Sometimes he plays around with words-‘green, bean, keen.’ That makes us believe he realizes the words are made of individual sounds. If we can get him to sound out the sounds, and combinations of sounds, then we would have some proof."

To teach Alex his letters, Pepperberg uses children’s plastic refrigerator magnets and relies on the bird’s impressive knowledge of colors. She combines a few letters of the same color and asks Alex what "sound" purple, for instance, makes.

After two years, Alex can recognize and pronounce several letter combinations, including "sh". However, he’s still not accurate enough to move on to longer words, says Pepperberg.

Life in the lab
Alex and his fellow lab birds enjoy a good, if unorthodox, life for a parrot. They spend between 8 and 12 hours a day playing and working with graduate students who run them through their paces in the MIT laboratory. Each bird has its own large cage with toys.

At night, rather than go home with a student or faculty member, for security reasons the birds are taken to a separate animal-care facility on campus.

The birds get half an hour of low lighting to simulate dusk, then 12 hours of darkness before another half hour of low light to simulate dawn. They then return to the main lab to begin another day.

Some animal-rights extremists who do not believe people should own animals "hang around the lab, asking when Alex is going to be released," says Pepperberg.

Others have seen pictures of Alex in his small, toyless sleeping cage and become upset, thinking the cage is his around-the-clock living quarters. However, "most people have praised Alex’s treatment as humane research," says the professor.

Alex has feather picked intermittently all of his life, including his wings. He suffers bouts of the habit when Pepperberg is away from him, traveling.

"Right now he’s fully feathered. The students here in Boston are so excellent and so involved with their work, I think he’s okay with my not being here all of the time."

Except for a tendency toward bossiness, Alex is a well-mannered bird with simple tastes-his favorite "toys" include cardboard boxes, telephone books and, perhaps for sentimental reasons, pieces of index cards.

Pepperberg characterizes him as merely run-of-the-mill in brain power, for an African grey.

"I think birds vary in their ability just like people. I think Alex is average. There are probably birds smarter than he is, that work really fast. Then there are going to be great birds that never talk at all."

Alex gets his own mail, much of it from children, at the e-mail address provided on Pepperberg’s site, alex@alexfoundation.org .

"In fact, one of our experiments, on object permanence [continued existence of hidden objects], was suggested by a letter from a child who had tried this with his own parrot and thought it would be a cool experiment for a young bird," says Pepperberg.

Long-term goals
Pepperberg hopes her research into African grey communication will accomplish several things. Preserving wild-parrot habitat, particularly the African grey’s, is one goal.

In recent years, several of Pepperberg’s University of Arizona graduate students have researched grey behavior and living conditions in their native Africa, from which tens of thousands of birds are still legally exported each year.

Pepperberg hopes her research will help bring changes to a country where parrots are still being poached in reserves with machetes.

"We all know that if you find an attractive point to peg a conservation issue onto--think of the dolphins and the tuna industry--you can get the public interested and outraged at what’s happening. We’re hoping that by showing how intelligent these birds are, we can work with the people in elephant and chimpanzee conservation and save some of these areas," she says.

"But it’s very scary. Some of these areas are war torn and people are starving. Anything that lives is bushmeat. People will kill anything to feed their children. It’s hard to argue that. But habitat destruction is something we can do about. We can’t prevent harvesting, but renewable resources are a possibility."

An area on which Pepperberg’s research has already had a positive influence is teaching handicapped children.

Therapist Diane Sherman with Newfound Therapies in Monterey, Calif., has successfully used Pepperberg’s modified rival/model technique with autistic children since 1993.

In one dramatic example, Sherman and an assistant were able to help a boy improve from flapping his hands and speaking gibberish to standing quietly and using complete sentences to request a coveted red toy Lamborghini.

The model/rival technique works because it’s like real life, says Sherman. "Take the example of the older sibling playing ball with a friend. The younger brother runs out and says, ‘Mom says you have to let me play, too.’ He tries but he throws the ball wrong and humiliates the older brother.

"The older boy then takes the ball and says, 'This is how you do it. Put four fingers on the seam and hold it back by your ear. This is how you’re doing it. You’re throwing it like a girl.’ The little brother tries again and does better, so he’s allowed to play."

A third prong of influence Pepperberg hopes her work will have is on understanding how human and animal brains work to aid in rehabilitation.

Although she has used magnetic resonance imaging, better known as MRI, to study how African greys vocalize, MRI’s resolution is not yet precise enough to show areas of activity in a bird’s much smaller brain, she says.

The state of consciousness
When such MRIs become possible, they might shed some light on the biggest question of all: Alex’s amazing feats of object labeling aside, just what degree of consciousness do animals possess?

It’s an area Pepperberg prefers not to discuss in depth.

"I just don’t know [how far it extends with birds or animals]. Most tests are very human centered. And even for those test results, you can come up with alternative explanations.

"We believe human beings are conscious. I know I am and I have to believe that you are and vice versa, but showing it in a scientific manner is very difficult."

Even memory, a capacity animals appear to possess because they respond in the same way to certain repeat situations, just as humans do, does not stand up to traditional science. "Behaviorists argue that it’s a simple stimulus response," notes Pepperberg.

Although she won’t be pinned down, it’s fairly obvious Pepperberg leans toward more progressive theories. After all, Alex acts only too human at times.

For one, he shows what most people would immediately recognize as the all-too-human trait of impatience.

"If he says, ‘I wanna go here or want x or y, and doesn’t get his way, he will repeat the phrase. If he still does not get his way, he will bang his beak," a common frustration behavior, says Pepperberg.

Once, when a research sponsor stopped by the lab to see Alex show off his "reading" skills, Alex seemed to show the visitor another type of behavior--condescension.

"He asked for a nut--'Wanna nut'--after each successful answer," remembers Pepperberg, chuckling. "Each time we asked him to perform one more time. And each time he repeated, ‘Wanna nut.’

"Finally, he said, ‘Wanna NUT!’. And then he sounded out the word the same way we taught him: ‘Nnn-uhhh-TUH!’ as if to spell it out for us."

Humans. Sometimes we’re just not that bright.

ParrotChronicles.com

-------