The parrot knows shapes
When he looks at a Kanizsa triangle, the famous optical illusion made up of three Pac-Man figures facing each other, Griffin doesn’t just see three figures converging on each other. He sees a triangle. That might not seem significant, until you realize that Griffin is a parrot. Despite a visual system vastly different from that of humans, the bird can successfully identify Kanizsa figures and occluded shapes, said Ken Nakayama, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, and Irene Pepperberg, a research associate in the Psychology Department, co-authors of a study on the subject. The findings, they said, suggest that birds may process visual information in a similar way to humans. The findings are described in a paper recently published in the journal Cognition. “There are 300 million years of evolution that separate us,” Pepperberg said. “Just anatomically, Griffin’s brain is very different from ours. Despite that, these data suggest he is solving these...