She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human in some respects, and had not reached his full potential by the time he died. Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively. īefore Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. Alex participating in a numerical cognition experimentīrandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S.Īlex ( – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University.
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