A study conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence reveals that blue-throated macaws, under the care of the Foundation, are capable of third-party imitation, a skill previously attributed only to humans.
Blue-throated macaws, a critically endangered species of parrot endemic to Bolivia, have been shown to be capable of imitating third parties, a phenomenon that until now had only been documented in humans. It consists of an observer learning from the interaction between two individuals.
A study conducted by an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, based at Loro Parque-Animal Embassy and in collaboration with Loro Parque Fundación, reveals that macaws learn to display certain unusual behaviours demonstrated by a conspecific in response to specific commands by a human hand without any explicit training.
This finding highlights the remarkable ability of parrots to learn through imitation, even as third parties. The result raises the possibility that parrots show an understanding of the equivalence between oneself and others and are capable of adopting the perspective of third parties.
The study: third-party imitation in macaws
Biologist Esha Haldar and her colleagues from the comparative cognition research group, based at the Max Planck Research Centre in Loro Parque, conducted third-party imitation tests with naive macaws (i.e., with no prior experience or knowledge of the stimulus to be evaluated).
In their study, now published in Scientific Reports, the researchers tested a naive test group that passively observed a demonstrator of the same species performing arbitrary and unusual intransitive actions (i.e., actions without an obvious goal and not involving any objects) in response to specific gestural commands from humans. For example, they watched as another parrot raised a leg in response to a raised index finger. Immediately afterwards, the observer received the same gestural commands from a person and was rewarded if they showed the correct response. A similarly naive control group, was evaluated in a similar manner without receiving third-party demonstrations.
The naive group learned more target actions in response to specific commands, and they learned them significantly faster and performed them more accurately than the control group. This implies that this species of macaw is capable of learning by observing the interactions of its conspecifics without interacting directly with them, i.e., through third-party imitation.
Imitation and cultural evolution
In humans, learning social norms and traditions often requires imitating two or more members of the community interacting with each other in order to integrate into groups, adopt group-specific behaviours, and participate in cultural practices. “Blue-throated macaws live in complex social groups, like most parrot species, and the composition of the group changes frequently over time. This requires faster integration of individuals into new social groups and faster group synchronisation. Third-party imitation of conspecifics may facilitate these processes by learning group-specific behaviours, coordinated movements, or gestures” says Dr. Auguste von Bayern, senior author of the study.
Evolutionary implications of this advanced social learning ability
“The findings are remarkable because they demonstrate for the first time that third-party imitation exists in a non-human animal,” explains Dr. Esha Haldar, lead author of the study. She adds that in humans, third-party imitation is widely observed and common in many modern hunter-gatherer societies, where children often learn social norms by passively observing their elders, rather than through direct interaction.
“However, third-party imitation has not been described in non-human animals. It is notable that human children begin to imitate from birth, but only develop the ability to imitate third parties from the second year of life, when they also develop the ability to take perspectives. Although our findings are not direct evidence of the ability to take perspectives in macaws, they do suggest its presence,” concludes Haldar.
