There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head.
They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice.
Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”.
The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.
It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.
Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice.
Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”.
The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.
It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.
Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg