On parrots, delay of gratification, executive function, and how sometimes we do the best we can.

Abstract

Engaging executive functions provides an individual with the means to engage in cognitive control by adjusting to the environment and processing information in a way that leads to optimal outcomes. There are some claims that explicit training on certain executive functioning abilities provides benefits beyond the training tasks, but other studies indicate that this may not be true or may be limited based on age and other factors. This same mixed pattern has been reported with nonhuman species, where training or even experience in one specific area, like inhibition, sometimes leads to positive transfer in new but similar tasks that presumably also require executive functions. Pepperberg and Hartsfield (2024) sought to determine whether experience in previous tasks that required different executive functions impacted how well three African grey parrots: Griffin, Pepper, and Franco could perform in a new assessment of delayed gratification. Griffin showed a clear and consistent capacity to wait through a delay for a quantitatively better reward. This suggested that the previous experience with the tokens aided improvement in the quantitative delay of gratification task with food items as the options to choose between. The other two parrots, Pepper and Franco, never completed the intended sequence of phases in their study. Unfortunately, the testing conditions dictated by COVID restrictions were such that these two subjects appeared to exhibit stress in doing the task, and so no further testing was conducted with them. This article is an example of what can happen when two intelligent species (people and parrots) are put in difficult circumstances (a global pandemic unlike anything any of us has ever been through), and yet both species attempted to continue to engage in science. The effects of COVID-19 will remain an integral factor in comparative psychology for some time to come, and I suspect there are many other half-completed experiments that suffered because of the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).