A grey parrot won against 21 Harvard students in a classic memory game. Can this animal be smarter than the elite students? Fox News explained that the African grey parrots, which can live up to 50 years old, can memorize a dozen English words and outsmart a group of Harvard students in a classic memory/shell game.
What happens when an African grey parrot goes head-to-head with 21 Harvard students in a test measuring a type of visual memory? https://t.co/l9ykYKYgP1 pic.twitter.com/W20sG5t14t — Harvard Alumni Association (@HarvardAlumni) July 6, 2020
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The grey parrot, named Griffin, was able to take the top of the class after participating as the main subject in a recent study published on May 6 by the journal Scientific Reports. In a working memory task, the study's researchers challenged the grey parrot to locate a colorful pom-pom hidden under a plastic cup. The researchers shuffled the plastic cups multiple times around a table--the game was called the "Shell Game." 21 Harvard students were also provided with the same challenge. However, Griffin was able to defeat them in 12 of 14 trials.
"Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That's pretty freaking awesome," said a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and also the lead author of the study, Hrag Pailian, via Harvard Gazette.
"We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-med, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts," added the lead author.
The 22-year-old parrot was compared to how 21 human adults and 21 six to eight-year-old children performed in a complex version of the classic shell game.
Grey parrot winning the game!
In all 14 trials, Griffin's target pom-pom was located with higher accuracy than the children who participated. The grey African parrot hit his targets with 100% accuracy after the Harvard students' performance started to slip in trials of three pom-poms shuffled three or four times.
However, Griffin's performance finally dropped when the pom-poms were shuffled three or four times; the students also dropped their accuracy. However, it is not quite as much as the bird. The researchers suggested that a feature called "manipulation" was used by the working memories of the Harvard students and the parrot to complete the challenge.
The test revealed that the study participants were not only able to remember which pom-poms were under which cups once they were out of sight, but they were able to manipulate the provided information as the plastic cups were shuffled multiple times. Although the students lost the game against one parrot, they'll still have the privileges an Ivy-league education has to offer them. Griffin was also rewarded, but with some raw cashew crackers.
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