Does your parrot recognize you on a webcam?

[entrancedbymyGCC]

I'm on business in Hawaii -- would have made a nice boondoggle, except I seriously mangled my toe on the way out the door but that's a whole 'nother story. I Skyped my husband tonight and he had Scooter out with him. Scooter definitely acted as if he recognized me in that video image, which I didn't expect! Is a bird's visual recognition that sophisticated and abstractable? I know he sometimes like to watch the TV but I figured it was kind of like watching a kaliedescope. My husband suggested their normal vision is not binocular so dealing with a "flattened" image is not as much of a leap as we might think. He did do the thing where they look first with one eye and then with the other to really check it out carefully. So I'm just curious if this is an experience anyone else has had. Would it actually help to "call" the bird when we're on vacation?

[bmsweb]

Jazz our Cockatiel does the same thing when he hears my wife's voice on my mobile. He gets all excited and won't stop talking, the one eye thing an all. If its someone else on the phone he wont bother at all. It could be voice related or possibly even the combination of voice and video.

[Michael]

Honestly I'm not even sure if they can see an image on a computer screen properly at all. Their vision is somewhere in the 100hz+ range whereas a computer monitor refreshes at 60hz. Our pathetic eyes see in the 15-30hz range. I'm not sure if their brain can weave back together disjoined images. Perhaps it looks to them like a 1910 motion picture where everyone is marching around in a fast jumpy motion. So this is something I wonder about but in preliminary observation it is difficult to conclude if they actually see a particular image or if they are just impressed by the flicker and colors. Perhaps they should ask Alex (or his replacement) to label the objects he sees on a computer screen. If he can do it with accuracy, then perhaps they can clearly see the images after all.

[skeetersunconure]

this is interesting i have always wondered the same thing over phones if pets can recognize my voice. of course my voice sounds differant over phones but still.

[Chicklet]

I've never tried the webcam but my birds definitely recognize my voice on the phone

Briar started making his little chirping contact call he uses to get my attention as soon as he heard my voice :p

[entrancedbymyGCC]

Honestly I'm not even sure if they can see an image on a computer screen properly at all. Their vision is somewhere in the 100hz+ range whereas a computer monitor refreshes at 60hz. Our pathetic eyes see in the 15-30hz range. I'm not sure if their brain can weave back together disjoined images.[...]

Michael, I'm afraid this time you are wrong!

For one thing, I'm not sure what it means to say that vision is at a specified frequency -- I don't know what drives the timing of the nerve impulses traveling from the retina to the brain, but I'm pretty sure they don't clock out row by row like a CCD... Or even work like snapshots taken at fixed intervals. I suspect it is far more complicated than that. I don't even know if we have an experimental setup that would tell us that. I THINK what you probably really mean is that they can detect changes in their visual field within 1/100 s.

Perhaps more to the point, most monitors these days are LCD monitors. LCD monitors are constantly backlit -- each pixel stays stable until it is told to change color and brightness, which does happen at something like a 60Hz rate, but the image is basically fixed, there is no "scan rate" as such. Modulo weird effects (there is a so-called LCD "flicker" effect but it has nothing to do with scan rates) if you display a photo, for example, the LCD image will stay unchanged on any timescale until you change the picture.

I think with a classic style CRT, you are probably correct that they are more aware of flicker, although even there the screens do have some persistence, so the image may not totally fade in and out. CRTs are pretty much a dying breed, however.

At any rate, I'm sure Scooter was able to SEE my image on the LCD monitor accurately... I'm less convinced that her truly did RECOGNIZE it as me. Did they ever do work with Alex and photos? I'll have to pull that copy of the Alex studies off my shelf when I get home. He certainly acted in a way that allowed we biased observers to believe he knew that image was somehow connected with me, but we are, in fact, biased so I'm not sure.

[bmsweb]

I know my cockatiel sees my mouse pointer because he chases it around the screen if I let him.

[tacotaco]

I know my cockatiel sees my mouse pointer because he chases it around the screen if I let him.

haha

[ptuga72]

Michael, I'm afraid this time you are wrong!

For one thing, I'm not sure what it means to say that vision is at a specified frequency -- I don't know what drives the timing of the nerve impulses traveling from the retina to the brain, but I'm pretty sure they don't clock out row by row like a CCD... Or even work like snapshots taken at fixed intervals. I suspect it is far more complicated than that. I don't even know if we have an experimental setup that would tell us that. I THINK what you probably really mean is that they can detect changes in their visual field within 1/100 s.

Perhaps more to the point, most monitors these days are LCD monitors. LCD monitors are constantly backlit -- each pixel stays stable until it is told to change color and brightness, which does happen at something like a 60Hz rate, but the image is basically fixed, there is no "scan rate" as such. Modulo weird effects (there is a so-called LCD "flicker" effect but it has nothing to do with scan rates) if you display a photo, for example, the LCD image will stay unchanged on any timescale until you change the picture.

I think Michael is thinking of flicker rate because parrots can perceive/see flicker rates of up to 120 hz. Meaning that on a 60hz CRT a parrot would be able to see the screen flashing and not as fluid movement/solid object the way we do. But you're right LCD screens don't have a true flicker/refresh. They label a tv as 60-240 hz but that just refers to how fast the LCD/LED changes to a different image. On a 60hz LCD screen a parrot would be able to see the image change, but could still see the image none-the-less.

I think the true question for me is can a parrot recognize a 2D image of a 3D object? My Husband thinks not, but I do. Parrots do recognize objects by seeing where it is in space, but it is totally plausible that a parrot could see a 2D image and still recognize the object in the image. Before we got Scarlet and the fosters, Jake would go nuts every time I watched something with parrots in it, like the Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, or Planet Earth.

[Natacha]

Never tried it, but it seems some of my parrots (Petey and Joey in particular) are able to recognize my boyfriend's voice on the phone. When he's off on business travels, I'll often hold the phone to Petey and you should see him..eyes pinning in excitement, kissy noise and being very very attentive to the phone. He doesn't react that way for everyone who would talk to him (the ones that don't think I'm crazy if I ask them to do this..)