Audiogram of the kea parrot,Nestor notabilis

Sexual Dimorphism in the Kea Nestor notabilis

The advantage of objects over images in discrimination and reversal learning by kea, Nestor notabilis

Studies investigating the same paradigm but employing different methods are often directly compared in the literature. One such paradigm used to assess behavioural flexibility in animals is reversal learning. Commonly, these studies require individuals to learn the reward contingency of either solid objects presented on the ground or images presented on a touchscreen. Once learned, these contin...

Social Behavior and the Ontogeny of Foraging in the Kea (Nestor notabilis)

Kea are omnivorous parrots endemic to the high mountains of the South Island of New Zealand. Over a two-year period, we recorded quantitative behavioral data from 38 banded male kea foraging at a refuse dump outside Arthur's Pass National Park and analyzed the effects of social factors on the ontogeny of foraging. Members of the four distinguishable age classes — fledglings, juveniles, subadult...

Kea (Nestor notabilis) consider spatial relationships between objects in the support problem.

The 'Support Problem' is a benchmark test to investigate the understanding of spatial relationships between objects. We tested kea parrots' performance in a paradigm that has previously been studied in primates. Kea perform comparably well to tamarins when they are confronted with a choice between two support devices, one of which has a reward resting on it and the other slightly next to it, or...

Visual artificial grammar learning: comparative research on humans, kea (Nestor notabilis) and pigeons (Columba livia).

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) provides a useful tool for exploring rule learning strategies linked to general purpose pattern perception. To be able to directly compare performance of humans with other species with different memory capacities, we developed an AGL task in the visual domain. Presenting entire visual patterns simultaneously instead of sequentially minimizes the amount of requi...