Grey parrot called Griffin humiliates Harvard students by beating them in a memory test

Daily Mail ^ | 8 July 2020 | Jonathan Chadwick

[Trillian]

A parrot called Griffin has humiliated students at Harvard University, as well as local children, by beating them in a memory test.

Harvard researchers compared human memory skills with those of the African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) – an animal separated from humans by more than 300 million years of evolution.

They compared how 21 Harvard undergraduates and 21 six-to-eight-year-old children performed against the 22-year-old bird Griffin in several rounds of a classic shell game.

The game required mentally tracking the locations of fluffy pom-poms hidden under cups that swapped places a number of times.

Griffin's accuracy was comparable to, and in some rounds slightly better than, human adults over 12 out of 14 different rounds of varying difficulty.

The parrot also demonstrated a performance better than chance and outperformed children across all conditions.

‘Think about it – grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That’s pretty freaking awesome,' study leader Hrag Pailian at Harvard’s Department of Psychology, told the Harvard Gazette.

‘We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-meds, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts.’

For each round, researchers placed four different-coloured fluffy pom-poms – red, blue, yellow and green – under four identical plastic cups in a line.

The position of the cups were swapped up to four times – one swap consisted of two switching position.

The object of the game was to be able to identify the location of a particular-coloured pom-pom when the researcher asked.

So not only did the human participants (and Griffin) have to locate one hidden object, as per most shell games, but they needed to simultaneously track the whereabouts of all four pom-poms to anticipate being asked for any of the four.

The participants were tested on tracking two, three, and four different-coloured pom-poms by pointing at the right cup,

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[Honorary Serb]

And Biden is nearly brain-dead!!

The Dims are nominating Biden to serve as a figurehead, and/or to get a VERY radical “woman-of-color” VP to end up as President!!!!

Everyone better vote for Trump, whether they like him or not!!!!

[rlmorel]

They are muscular and athletic, and they sure take advantage of that!

I do note though, they don’t mess around with squirrels and chipmunks (who, I believe bite them) and definitely not turkeys.

Nobody messes with the turkeys when they show up. Everyone gets out of their way.

[ifinnegan]

Clever Hans.