Cognitive Testing

Have you seen us out and about in Sydney, presenting cockatoos with touchscreens? This is the work of University of Zurich Master's student Lara Blumenstiel and Australian National University Honour's student Lee DeSouza. 

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. Lara and Lee are 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 and Lee's experiments, run over winters 2025 and 2026, consisted of 3 Stages. In Stage 1, birds were trained to touch a shape on the screen to receive an almond. In Stage 2, birds applied their new knowledge to learn which of two shapes on the screen are rewarding, a test of associative learning. In Stage 3, the rewarding shape is reversed, testing their cognitive flexibility. They are now busy preparing results for publication.