To him, researchers believe, it is a social way to bond with his owner. As it stands, Snowball doesn't dance in anticipation of food or to mate. But Snowball, researchers found, dances similarly to humans in that he does so in a way that is both "spontaneous and diverse" in response to music.Īccording to the study, in order for this to happen, a bird must be a strong communicator and nonverbal imitator with a proclivity for form strong social bonds. Occurred on Septem/ Pottsville, Pennsylvania, USA'A bird that doubles as an extreme dance coach.'Contact to license this. When the videos were reviewed, scientists found that Snowball performed 14 unique dance moves - including head banging, posing, Voguing, body rolling, and different variations of foot-lifting, among others.Ĭockatoos are a subspecies of parrots, which are known to be imitators. ![]() As part of the study, Snowball was filmed dancing to Queen's " Another One Bites the Dust" and Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." Each were played three times over the course of about 23 minutes. Scientists began to study the bird and his dance moves following the viral video. ![]() A mature female usually has reddish-brown irises. The irises of males are usually dark brown, appearing nearly black. Some exhibit a tinge of light blue in the rings around their eyes. Umbrella cockatoos have black beaks and gray or black feet. The social context for Snowball’s dancing is important. “For humans, dancing is a form of social interaction,” said Patel. “We prefer to dance with partners rather than alone.” Is this also true for Snowball? The researchers hope to find out by analyzing data from another experiment that directly addresses that question.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Males have broader heads and larger beaks. “We hadn’t expected to find so many different dance moves, which were revealed by choreographic analysis of our videos by our paper’s first author, Joanne Jao Keehn, a cognitive scientist at San Diego State University and a trained dancer.” The researchers were especially surprised by moves that seemed to be made up by Snowball, because his owner-Irena Schulz, a co-author on the study-doesn’t make those moves when she dances with him.ĭancing to music isn’t just an arbitrary product of human culture. “It’s a response to music that arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in animal brains,” said Patel. Their work with Snowball led the researchers to suggest five distinct capacities that form key evolutionary prerequisites for dancing to music. “We think this helps explain why so few species-and no other primates-share our impulse to move to music in spontaneous and diverse ways,” he said. “It’s a response to music that arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in animal brains,” said Aniruddh Patel. “Snowball has a loving home at the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service shelter, but many parrots are not as lucky.” “It’s fun to watch videos of them, but often people don’t realize how much work it is to have a parrot,” he said. Patel shared three main lessons from the research, along with a cautionary note that large parrots are demanding pets and should not be acquired solely to watch them dance. Patel, who specializes in the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and responding to music, said that the study, published today in Current Biology, provides insight about the biology and evolution of human musicality by examining how other species process music. Now a new study by Patel and his colleagues show that parrots hold another similar trait to humans: they can respond to music using a wide variety of movements and body parts. ![]() ![]() More than ten years ago, groundbreaking research by Tufts psychology professor Aniruddh Patel on a sulphur-crested cockatoo-a species of parrot-named Snowball bobbing its head to the beat of a Backstreet Boys song demonstrated that parrots-unlike most species, including monkeys-have the cognitive capacity to anticipate a beat and move to it.
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