New research from the University of Vienna shows that cockatoos have the ability of portraying self control similar to that of humans, which is rare among non-human animals, according to the researchers at the University.
Researchers conducted an analysis on 14 birds to observe the unique impulse control among these animals. Birds like crows, ravens, jays, jackdaws, magpies and others from the corvid family have shown significant self control behavior in previous studies. The idea of conducting the research on cockatoos was simply to test if other clever birds, which are distantly related to corvids can display a similar behavior.
According to Isabelle Laumer, who conducted the study in the Goffin Lab at the University of Vienna, the Goffin's cockatoos, an Indonesian cockatoo species, were allowed to pick up an initial choice of food and were given a chance to return it to the researcher after a certain time. The bird was awarded with a better and larger quantity of food if the bird hadn't nibbled the food by that time.
"Although we picked pecan nuts as initial reward which were highly liked by the birds and would under normal circumstances be consumed straight away, we found that all 14 of birds waited for food of higher quality, such as cashew nut for up to 80 seconds," Laumer explained.
Alice Auersperg, manager of the Vienna Goffin Lab, said that parrots acted "astonishingly like economic agents" during the exchange experiments. She noted that these birds smartly chose their most favorable food over the initial items and in a control test where the value of the initial food item was better than expected, the cockatoos decided not to trade.
The study is published in the current issue of the journal Biology Letters.