Ellie, an 11-year-old Goffin’s cockatoo, with a touchscreen. In a cautious new paper, a team of scientists outlines a framework for evaluating whether technology like touch screens might give animals new ways to express themselves. — Jennifer Cunha via The New York Times
Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to converse with apes and trained parrots to deploy growing English vocabularies.
The work quickly attracted media attention – and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics argued, and what seemed like animal communication could simply have been wishful thinking, with researchers unconsciously cuing their animals to respond in certain ways.
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