Cockatoos go to carpentry school

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 2-Sep-2014

Contact: University of Oxford News Office
University of Oxford
Cockatoos go to carpentry school

Goffin's cockatoos can learn how to make and use wooden tools from each other, a new study has found.

The discovery, made by scientists from Oxford University, the University of Vienna, and the Max Planck Institute at Seewiesen, is thought to be the first controlled experimental evidence for the social transmission of tool use in any bird species.

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The successful birds did not just imitate Figaro's movements: their tool-use techniques were themselves new. Figaro held tools by their tips, inserted them through the cage grid at different heights and raked the nuts towards him while adjusting the tool's position as the target moved closer. The successful observers, instead, laid the sticks on the ground and propelled the nuts into their reach by a quick ballistic flipping movement. The latter technique was arguably more efficient for the test circumstances, which differed from those in which Figaro had made his first discovery; the pupils in this sense surpassed the teacher's performance.

'This means that although watching Figaro was necessary for their success they did not imitate his exact motor activities. Successful observers seemed to attend to the result of Figaro's interaction with the tool but developed their own strategies for reaching the same result, rather than copying his actions. This is typical of what psychologists would call emulation learning,' explains Dr Alice Auersperg who led the study at the Goffin Lab at the University of Vienna.

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Two of the successful observers were later tested in the absence of ready-made tools, but offering them suitable tool-making material. One of them spontaneously started to make his own tools out of a wooden block, while the other initially failed, but then did so after a single demonstration session watching Figaro carve tools out of a block. Whilst inconclusive, this shows that learning to use tools may in itself stimulate the acquisition of tool-making, which is more distant from the target behaviour and closer to behavioural planning.

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