Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to talk to monkeys and trained parrots to deploy increasingly large English vocabularies.
The work quickly attracted media attention – and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics argued, and what appeared to be animal communication could simply have been wishful thinking, with researchers unconsciously nudging their animals to respond in a certain way..
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, research fell out of favor. ‘The whole field completely fell apart’ said Irene Pepperberg, a comparative cognition researcher at Boston University who became known for her work with an African gray parrot named Alex.
Today, technological advances and a growing appreciation for the sophistication of the animal mind have renewed interest in finding ways to bridge the gap between species. Pet owners teach their dogs to press “talk buttons” and zoos train their monkeys to use touch screens.
In a tentative new paper, a team of scientists outlines a framework to evaluate whether such tools can provide animals with new ways to express themselves. The research is intended “to rise above some of the things that have been controversial in the past,” said Jennifer Cunha, a visiting scholar at Indiana University.
The paper, to be presented at a scientific conference on Tuesday, focuses on Ms Cunha’s parrot, an 11-year-old Goffin’s cockatoo named Ellie. Since 2019, Ms. Cunha has been teaching Ellie to use an interactive “speech board,” a tablet-based app that contains more than 200 illustrated icons corresponding to words and phrases, including “sunflower seeds,” “happy” and “I feel hot.” When Ellie When you press an icon with her tongue, a computer voice speaks the word or sentence out loud.
In the new study, Ms. Cunha and her colleagues did not want to determine whether Ellie’s use of the speech board amounted to communication. Instead, they used quantitative, computational methods to analyze Ellie’s icon presses to learn more about whether the speech board had so-called “expressive and enriching potential.”
“How can we analyze the expression to see if there is room for intention or communication?” Mrs. Cunha said. “And secondly, the question is, can her selections give us an idea about her values, the things she finds meaningful?”
The scientists analyzed almost 40 hours of video footage, collected over a period of seven months, of Ellie’s use of the speech board. They then compared icon pressing with several simulations of a hypothetical speech board user randomly selecting icons.
“They all ended up being significantly different from the real data in several ways,” says Nikhil Singh, a PhD candidate at MIT who created the models. “This virtual user we had couldn’t fully capture what the real Ellie was doing when he used this tablet.”
In other words, no matter what Ellie was doing, it seemed like she wasn’t just randomly mashing icons. The speech board’s design, including the icon’s brightness and location, also couldn’t fully explain Ellie’s selections, the researchers found.
Determining whether or not Ellie’s selections were random “is a very good starting point,” she said Federico Rossano, a comparative cognition researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “The problem is that randomness is very unlikely.”
The fact that Ellie didn’t randomly encounter icons doesn’t mean she was actively and deliberately trying to convey her true wishes or feelings, said Dr. Rossano. She may simply be repeating sequences she learned during training. “It’s like an automatic,” he said. “You can learn to push a series of numbers and get a certain kind of reward. It doesn’t mean you think about what you’re doing.”
To explore the possibilities further, the research team then looked for signs of what they called “confirmation.” If Ellie selected the apple icon, did she eat the apple she was given? If she selected a reading-related icon, did she spend at least a minute with the book?
“You can give something to a bird, and they throw it or they touch it,” Ms. Cunha said. “But for us it was about: was she doing it?”
Not all of Ellie’s selections could be evaluated in this way; for example, it was impossible for the researchers to determine whether she felt truly happy or excited at any given moment. But of the nearly 500 icon presses that could be reviewed, 92 percent were confirmed by Ellie’s subsequent behavior.
“Clearly they have a good correlation there,” said Dr. Pepperberg, who was not involved in the study.
But proving that Ellie really understands what the icons mean will require additional testing, she said, suggesting that the researchers are deliberately trying to give Ellie the wrong object. to see how she reacts. “It’s just another check to make sure the animal really understands what the label represents,” said Dr. Pepperberg.
Finally, the researchers sought to assess whether the speech board served as a form of enrichment for Ellie by analyzing the types of icons she selected most often.
“If it is a means to an end, what is the end?” says Rébecca Kleinberger, author of the paper and researcher at Northeastern University, where she studies how animals interact with technology. “It appears that there was a preference for social activities or activities that involve continuing to interact with the caregiver.”
About 14 percent of the time, Ellie selected icons for food, drinks or treats, the researchers found. On the other hand, about 73 percent of her selections corresponded to activities that provided social or cognitive enrichment, such as playing a game, visiting another bird or simply communicating with Ms. Cunha. Ellie also started using the speech board 85 percent of the time.
“Ellie the cockatoo interacted consistently with her device, suggesting that it remained engaging and reinforcing for her to do this over several months,” said Amalia Bastos, a comparative cognition researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who was not an author of the article.
The study has limitations. There is a limit to what scientists can extrapolate from a single animal, and it is difficult to rule out that Ms Cunha may have unconsciously prompted Ellie to react in a certain way, outside experts say. But scientists also praised the researchers’ systematic approach and modest claims.
“They don’t say, ‘Can the parrot talk?’” said Dr. Rossano. “They say, ‘Can this be used for enrichment?'”
Dr. Bastos agreed. “This work is a critical first step,” she said. It is also an example of how the field has changed for the better since the 1970s.
“Researchers currently working in this area are not bringing the same assumptions to the table,” said Dr. Bastos. “We don’t expect animals to understand or use language the way humans do.” Instead, she added, scientists are interested in using communication tools to “improve the well-being of captive animals and their relationships with their caretakers.”