Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists have tried using sign language to converse with monkeys and trained parrots to develop growing English vocabularies.
The project quickly attracted media attention – and controversy. The research lacked rigour, critics argued, and what appeared to be animal communication could simply have been wishful thinking, with researchers unconsciously prompting their animals to respond in certain ways.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, research fell out of favor. “The whole stadium completely fell apart” said Irene Pepperberg, a comparative cognitive researcher at Boston University who became famous for her work with an African gray parrot named Alex.
Today, advances in technology and a growing appreciation for the complexity of the animal mind have renewed interest in finding ways to bridge the species divide. Pet owners teach their dogs to press “talking buttons” and zoos train their monkeys to use touch screens.
On a cautious note new paper, a team of scientists describes a framework for evaluating whether such tools could give animals new ways to express themselves. The research is designed “to overcome some of the things that were controversial in the past,” said Jennifer Cunha, a visiting researcher at Indiana University.
The paper, which is being presented at a scientific conference on Tuesday, focuses on Ms Cunha’s parrot, an 11-year-old Goffin’s cockatoo called Ellie. Since 2019, Ms Cunha has been teaching Ellie to use an interactive ‘talk board’, a tablet-based app containing more than 200 illustrated icons, corresponding to words and phrases such as ‘sunflower’, ‘happy’ and ‘ feeling warm.” When Ellie presses an icon with her tongue, a computer voice speaks the word or phrase out loud.
In the new study, Ms Cunha and her colleagues did not try to determine whether Ellie’s use of the talking board amounted to communication. Instead, they used quantitative, computational methods to analyze Ellie’s icon presses to learn more about whether the talking board had what they called “expressive and enriching potential.”
“How can we analyze expression to see if there is room for intention or communication?” said Ms. Cunha. “And then, secondly, the question is, could her choices give us an idea of her values, the things she finds meaningful?”
The scientists analyzed nearly 40 hours of video, collected over seven months, of Ellie using the speech board. They then compared her icon presses to several simulations of a hypothetical whiteboard user selecting icons at random.
“In the end they were all significantly different in many ways from the real data,” said Nikhil Singh, a doctoral student at MIT who created the models. “This virtual user we had was not able to fully capture what the real Ellie was doing when using this tablet.”
In other words, whatever Ellie was doing, she didn’t seem to be just randomly mashing icons. The design of the talking board, including icon brightness and location, couldn’t fully explain Ellie’s choices either, the researchers found.
Determining whether Ellie’s choices were random or not “is a very good place to start,” he said Federico Rossano, a comparative cognition researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. “The problem is that randomness is very unlikely.”
Just because Ellie wasn’t tapping icons randomly doesn’t mean she was actively and intentionally trying to communicate her true wants or feelings, Dr. Rossano said. He may have simply been repeating sequences he learned during training. “It’s like a vending machine,” 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 further explore the possibilities, the research team then looked for signs of what they called “confirmation.” If Elli chose the apple icon, did she eat the apple she was given? If he selected a reading-related icon, did he engage with the book for at least one minute?
“You can give something to a bird and they will throw it or touch it,” Ms Cunha said. “But for us it was about, did he deal with it?”
Not all of Ellie’s choices could be evaluated in this way. It was impossible for the researchers to determine, for example, whether she was actually feeling happy or warm at any given moment. But of the nearly 500 icon presses that could be evaluated, 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 research.
But proving that Ellie actually understands what the icons mean will require additional testing, he said, suggesting that researchers deliberately try to bring Ellie the wrong object. to see how he responds. “It’s just another check to make sure the animal really has that understanding of what the tag represents,” Dr. Pepperberg said.
Finally, the researchers sought to assess whether the talking board served as a form of enrichment for Ellie by analyzing the types of icons she chose most often.
“If it is a means to an end, what is the end?” said Rébecca Kleinberger, an author of the paper and a researcher at Northeastern University, where she studies how animals interact with technology. “There seems to have been a bias towards social activity or activity that means staying in interaction with the caregiver.”
About 14 percent of the time, Ellie chose icons for food, drink or treats, the researchers found. On the other hand, about 73 percent of her choices 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 initiated use of the talking board 85 percent of the time.
“Ellie the cockatoo consistently interacted with her device, suggesting that it remained attractive and reinforcing to her over several months,” said Amalia Bastos, a comparative cognitive researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who was not an author of the paper.
The study has limitations. There is a limit to what scientists can support from a single animal, and it is difficult to rule out the possibility that Ms Cunha may have been unconsciously prompting Ellie to respond in certain ways, outside experts said. But scientists also praised the researchers’ systematic approach and modest claims.
“They don’t say, ‘Can the parrot talk?’ Dr. Rossano said. “They say, ‘Can this be used for enrichment?’
Dr. Bastos agreed. “This work is a critical first step,” he said. It’s also an example of how the field has changed, for the better, since the 1970s.
“Researchers currently working in the area are not bringing the same cases to the table,” said Dr. Bastos. “We don’t expect animals to understand or use language the way humans do.” Instead, he added, scientists are interested in using communication tools to “improve the welfare of captive animals and their relationships with their caretakers.”