Parrots can imitate meaningless behavior almost as well as humans
There have been many studies on the capability of non-human animals to mimic transitive actions—actions that have a purpose. Hardly any studies have shown that animals are also capable of intransitive actions. Even though intransitive actions have no particular purpose, imitating these non-conscious movements is still thought to help with socialization in a group and strengthen bonds for both animals and humans.
Zoologist Esha Haldar and colleagues from the Comparative Cognition Research group worked with blue-throated macaws, which are critically endangered, at the Loro Parque Fundación in Tenerife. They trained the macaws to perform two intransitive actions, then set up a conflict: two neighboring macaws were asked to do different actions.
What Haldar and her team found was that individual birds were more likely to perform the same intransitive action as a bird next to them, no matter what they’d been asked to do. This could mean that macaws possess mirror neurons, the same neurons that, in humans, fire when we are watching intransitive movements and cause us to imitate them (at least if these neurons function the way some think they do).
