Cockatoos Forgo A Treat Now For Future Rewards
Great Goffin Sam Mugraby via Wikimedia CommonsDo you have as much self-control as a Goffin cockatoo? Could you hold a cookie in your mouth for a minute without eating it, if you were promised something even more delicious in exchange for the wait? Most animals can't control their impulse to gobble up the food in front of them. Humans, primates and corvids (a family of hoarding birds such as crows and ravens that already save food for later) can all delay delicious gratification for a minute or longer, but most animals can't wait more than a second or two. New research from the University of Vienna suggests that cockatoos also can also be trained to resist instant gratification for something more tempting down the road. A study on an Indonesian variety of parrot, the Goffin cockatoo, in Biology Letters this week is the first to show that a non-hoarding bird...