Cognitive Testing

Have you seen us out and about in Sydney, presenting cockatoos with touchscreens? This is the work of Lara Blumenstiel, a masters student at the University of Zurich & visitor at the Australian National University. 

Touchscreen 'computer games' are a common method in lab studies to test a range cognitive abilities in animals, from the ability to learn new associations to abstract reasoning. For her thesis, Lara is to taking the 'lab to the wild', and asking whether wild cockatoos can learn to play a touchscreen game. As with all our work, participating is completely voluntary, the cockies choose to come to us and take a few minutes out of their busy day to play the game!

Lara's experiment consists of 3 Stages. In Stage 1, the birds are trained to touch a square on the screen to receive an almond reward. In Stage 2, the birds will have to apply their new knowledge to learn which of two shapes on the screen is rewarding, a test of associative learning ability. In Stage 3, she will reverse which shape is rewarding, testing their cognitive flexibility. 

Once we have establishing the testing paradigm, we can use it to ask a range of questions about the cognitive abilities of cockatoos, as well as the influence on urban living on cognition.