Wild sulphur-crested cockatoos in Sydney have demonstrated a capacity for social learning, adopting new food preferences by observing their peers, according to a recent study. Researchers trained groups of parrots to consume artificially dyed almonds and then monitored how quickly other cockatoos began to eat the same foods, revealing significant insights into their learning behaviors, reports ...
The relevance to birds as social players is palpable here: long period of development (super-altricial) and large brains are characteristics of all socially playing birds (Diamond and Bond, 2003). As I discovered in a detailed study of over 200 species of songbirds and parrots, play behaviour and cognition are firmly linked (Kaplan, 2020).
Birds have contributed a great deal to our understanding of social learning. In this chapter we briefly review this extensive body of research, describing the contexts in which birds use social information to make behavioral decisions. We discuss the ecological factors that promote social learning, and the mechanisms by which social learning occurs. We consider individual differences in social ...
In this Special Issue, we aim to increase knowledge of the social behaviors and learning abilities of parrots, with the overall goal of better understanding parrot cognition and behavior through publishing high-quality, original research articles and comprehensive reviews.
58 birds are capable of social learning and possess the basic building blocks for animal culture. 59 Indeed, song learning in passerines is one of the best-studied forms of animal culture, with
